I am feeling pretty perplexed by Antshares growth at this point. I choose to reply here since this post outlines a lot of the positives to be excited about with Antshares. However, in contrast to other early adoption crypto interests (LBRY, IOTA, SIA, STEEM, BTS), Antshares in my opinion feels like a very rough product. Here is an outline of some of my initial criticisms:

1. The Antshares website feels rough and has limited functionality. For example, some of the wallets are either not completed (android / ios) wallets or not functional (osx). This is a rather important feature set considering the relationship of the wallets to Antcoin generation.
2. I am an Apple user, so I opted for the web portal wallet. My test transfer from Bittrex has yet to show in the web wallet (3 hours). I will update my experience with the web wallet and the result of my test transfer later.
3. It is my understanding that Antcoins are only supported with the pc wallet at this time. Regardless, a transfer from Bittrex costs 1 ANS. This is more than $10 transaction fee at the time of this post.
   At this point, I am suspicious that most of the Antshares hype centers around 3 primary considerations: 1. Antshares asserts to be a next generation Ethereum-like product. 2. Antshares is a China product, and therefore speculation is that it will be heavily adopted by China business interests. 3. ANS market cap is comparatively low to ETH.
   I am still very interested to learn more from the steemit community that has more experience with this cryptocurrency as well as any takeaways from the upcoming Antshares conference.