Last week, Aptos Ecosystems was kind enough to host us for an AMA. While this isn’t a direct transcript, our community manager Afonso has written responses to all the questions he found in the comments.
Some questions are edited for clarity only. If you would like to listen to the recording, click here.
Your previous projects have been successful, but why should I choose your team in a new more crowded network?
A: Our previous experience is exactly why we will succeed in Aptos. Besides the great development experience from the dev team, that allowed us to beat the competition on Kadena, we also already have all the systems in place to start onboarding projects. So all of the legal stuff, KYC, paperwork, all of that takes time and money. We have all that ready to go. We have a proven system!
What kind of Tiers will there be and do you have guaranteed allocations for the IDOs?
A: We will always have guaranteed allocations. Again, we have a system in place on our Kadena launchpad that has been successful. But we also heard the community feedback and plan to make slight adjustments to improve on it. Community feedback is something we take very seriously, after all, the tier system is how the community can invest and be rewarded for believing in APLaunch!
Where do you get the funding to build a project, of which 76% of tokens go to the community?
A: We are doing an IDO of $APL to raise funds and sustain ourselves until we start launching projects (which will be the main source of revenue). I don’t think relying on project tokens to sustain it is very healthy, we want the tokens to be in the community’s hands and the market to decide its price, not to dump on the community because we need to pay the bills.
Why did AP_Launch team choose APTOS chain among those other POS chains? Is there any specific reason behind it?
A: First of all, we are not Maxis, we believe in blockchain technology as a whole and don’t think this is a zero-sum game where only 1 blockchain will succeed. Having said that, some seem better placed to succeed. Aptos is looking like one of the front runners to be the prime layer 1 when the next market cycle comes. It has the funding, the tech, and the development interest to succeed. We see a lot of projects working on some cool concepts, so we want to join and help build something great. Also, having tried the chain, it is so fast and smooth, with great developer tools. Which is one of the things that will make onboarding new users easy!
Why will projects choose AP_Launch over other launchpads out there, both in the Aptos ecosystem and the blockchain ecosystem in general?
A: Our background and launchpad experience should be our main attraction, but certainly not the only one. We have KYC in place, so projects can raise safely without having to worry about legal repercussions. We have the tier system tested and ready to go, no question marks if it works or not. We follow up on all projects on a weekly basis and provide them with technical, business, marketing, and legal support. We are not simply a launch tool, we are partners. We just don’t believe in doing things any other way.
We all know that the success of a project is largely determined by effective marketing. Do you have any specific plans to recruit new community members?
A: This is the hardest one right? So many projects out there, so many launchpads, it’s hard to stand out. We have been looking at a lot of marketing tools, we discuss this daily. But we don’t want to throw money at “shillers” for the sake of shilling. We want community members to join because they believe in us, in our work and because they trust us. A funny story regarding this, we applied to several ecosystem pages once we went live. One of them was not very happy about listing us because our follower count was low. I said “well, that’s why we need you to list us” and they replied “but you have a low count, this is not very trustworthy. You can buy followers you know?” So the solution to make us trustworthy was to buy bot followers. We obviously did not do such a thing, instead kept trying to reach out to all of the community and will grow organically from here. If it takes a bit more time to launch because of it, so be it. We want to do it right!
In the crypto space, there is no way to guarantee a new project is 100% likely to succeed. Can you tell us about AP_Launch Vetting process and how you can detect a potential scam, fakes, and rug-pull projects and help protect your investors from scam projects?
A: This is a really important question. Investors should feel safe when parting with their hard-earned money. We have a very thorough screening process for applying projects. Every project needs to sign legal documents, do KYC and show us development proof, even if it’s just a proof of concept. We also ask for a business plan and get an overall sense of their feeling toward the community and how they want to run their project. All of this is discussed internally with the core team members of APLaunch and we have several meetings with the project to make sure we want to move forward. We don’t do memecoins, anonymous teams or “ideas”, we want tangible projects with serious people who know how to build once they have the funds. To put in perspective how picky we are, on KDLaunch, we launched on average 1 out of every 10 applicants
I know some of our competitors chose a different approach, with an insurance fund, but in our mind, this is not sustainable, and it’s quite dangerous for the launchpad token itself. You catch a bad project, and not only are you jeopardizing the investors, but you are also devaluing your own token. We prefer to do the screening process right than make insurance systems that might collapse our token.
Will you serve only on Aptos network? Or will other networks be included in the system?
A: We are already multichain, with Kadena. And we will definitely look to expand in the future. As I said before, we are chain agnostic and want to help the whole ecosystem grow. The decision of which chain to launch on should be coming from the projects, and we want to facilitate that decision.
What are the benefits of buying and holding your tokens for a long time?
A: This is the best part of $APL, the use case is simple and easy to understand. Having APL will allow its holders to participate in the fundraising of projects that choose to launch with us. You will also be able to stake APL and earn a passive income, to reward early investors in the project. And we believe the token will grow in value as the Aptos ecosystem grows as well and more projects build here!
* View APL tokenomics
Security is the first priority of all projects and platforms. Do you believe that project is secure enough and protected from hackers? Does your project have a Bug Bounty Program for all those who value the detection of individual vulnerabilities of systems?
A: Absolutely, this is very very important to us. We will allocate part of the raise to the bug bounty and audit budget.
Is there any vesting for new projects?
A: we always look for projects tokenomics, and make sure the vesting makes sense for the community. On Kadena, we incentivized projects to use a token locker that we built ourselves. We will look for those kinds of solutions in Aptos as well, and if none exist, we will do it ourselves!
APLaunch will there be special privileges for first-time investors?
The staking benefits the early investors for sure, also the stable and low valuation of the token. If anyone has further suggestions to reward our early investors, send us a message on discord/tg/twitter, we are happy to listen and implement the ones that are cool and original!
I want to know how has the experience of your team helped in the development of your project?
A: We already talked a little bit about this, but we can summarise it here. Having previous experience as a launchpad developer has helped us with:
- Legal setup (KYC, partnership deals, already incorporated, etc…)
- Launchpad setup (tiers, tokenomics, etc…)
- Development setup
- Network connections
- Community building
