Late last week, an anonymous user raised an issue on Aptos‘ Github, claiming that Aptos stole a majority of their work from Diem, a blockchain project launched by Meta, the parent company of social media giant Facebook.
The founders of Aptos, Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh, previously worked at Diem, with Avery previously holding the tech lead at Diem.
While the anonymous Github user had their ticket closed, another account named “definitely not legal advice“ raised a separate ticket that listed out what they claimed were both Copyright Infringement of the Diem blockchain, as well as Mo Shaikh violating his employee contract with Facebook.
Their claim was that Aptos was basically a “Shallow fork” of what Meta was building, with just only “incremental adaptions” to the code. The user also extends this argument, saying that “95% or more of the code in this repo is not your intellectual property.”
Their claim continues to show a timeline of Mo’s development of Aptos, which includes a possible violation of his employee contract with Facebook, and a $1B settlement with investor Glazers.
It also goes on to say that Mo “actively solicited” staff from Facebook, which would likely violate any non-compete clauses within their contracts.
Implications For Token Holders and Developers
While neither Mo nor Avery have commented on the issues raised, a contributor on the Aptos Github has been closing the tickets, flagging them as spam.
The price of Aptos has also dropped 7% from an intra-day high of $18 to $16.81, after news of the Github comments went viral on Twitter.
Although there are no changes to the “fundamentals” of Aptos, the allegations have sparked fear in an already deep bear market. Furthermore, if they were to be true, this could mean that the shady business ethics could extend further.
For example, the ties that Aptos had with Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, could be called into question. Developers on the platform that acted despite knowing this could also face legal implications going forward.
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[Editor’s Note: This article does not represent financial advice. Please do your research before investing.]
Featured Image Credit:Â Aptos Labs
