APT

Aptos · Move L1 (Block-STM, on-chain trading engine focus)

32 /100

T4Speculative · #39 of 77

No engine yetTwo-way ↘medium likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

DemandSoundnessDurability

9 of 4516 of 407 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 73% of issued supply

Circulating 883.4M, 42%
Locked or unvested 327.1M, 16%
Not yet issued 889.5M, 42%
Max 2.10B

FDV / market cap

1.4x

$882.2M / $643.8M

Market cap

$643.8M

Price $0.729, 7d −12.8%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

Aptos spent 2026 rewriting its tokenomics: staking rewards were halved to a fixed 2.6%, gas was repriced 10x, investor and contributor vesting ended on Oct 12, 2026, and the Foundation pledged 210M APT to permanent staking. The direction is right, but the engine is still small: trailing-year fees are ~$1.2M, the burn offsets about a tenth of issuance, and the 'hard cap' vote was an empty proposal whose code has not shipped. Soundness is the weak side: there was no public sale, the Foundation directs the community pool and ~27% of supply still vests under it, and every governance vote is decided by one Foundation-led bloc of ~310-390M APT, with upgrades executing three days after a vote. On-chain activity rose to ~9M transactions a day on Decibel's order book while Aptos DeFi TVL fell ~95% in a year to ~$43M and APT fell ~76%.

How value reaches holders

Gas burn only, on a small base. Every transaction's gas is burned at execution; since the validator fee distribution of AIP-126 was switched on (feature flag 97 is enabled), execution and IO gas priced above 90 octas per gas unit (the minimum is 100) is re-minted at each epoch end into the block proposer's stake pool, capped at 20 APT per pool per epoch, which sampled at ~84-112 APT per 2-hour epoch (~19% of the burn) on Oct 22-23, 2026. Storage fees are burned but refunded when state is deleted. Net burn ran ~174K APT in the 30 days to Oct 21, 2026 (~2.1M APT/yr, ~$1.6M at today's price) against ~19.5M APT/yr of newly minted staking rewards (a fixed 2.6% on ~761M staked since Mar 16, 2026), so the yield is mostly dilution. No fee share, no buyback (the Foundation is only 'exploring' one), and the 2.1B cap is a governance commitment that is not in code

Score anatomy

Demand

9 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

Gas is burned by protocol (all storage fees and 90 of the 100-octa minimum gas price); the excess, ~19% sampled, is re-minted to the block proposer's pool, and governance sets the split

Plumbing at 50%+, or 100% via contract but governance-revocablemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

~$1.19M of gas fees over the trailing year (DefiLlama), down 31% year on year despite the 10x gas repricing of Mar 19, 2026; ~174K APT burned in the 30 days to Oct 21

$0.5-5M/yr, or undisclosedhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

Pays Aptos gas only; Aptos DeFi TVL is ~$43M (down ~95% in a year) and stablecoin supply ~$864M, so APT is not base collateral for any large economy

Pays its own network's fees (gas never counts higher, whatever the size of the economy)high confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

Aptos DeFi TVL fell 94% to $0.04B and stablecoins 47% to $0.86B YoY; fees $1.2M: usage down 60%+

Marginal or fading: negligible use for its size, usage down 60%+ year on year, or a lost forkmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 1, minus 0.5 for routing 4 = cash flow 0.5. Money use 1. The engine is the stronger route: 1.

Soundness

16 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Staking mints a fixed 2.6%/yr on ~761M staked (~19.5M APT, 1.6% of supply, ~1.5% net of burns), a rate set by stake-weighted vote; the 2.1B cap vote was text-only, not in code

1-3%/yr on a published curve, or 3-7%/yr under a hard cap with halvingshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

Float ~73% (883M of 1.21B); investor and contributor vesting ended Oct 12, 2026, leaving ~4.54M APT/month (~0.5% of float) of Foundation and community releases until Oct 2032

0.5-1.5% per month, or large foundation or treasury holdings without a schedulemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

No public sale: private investors got 13.48% (a16z, FTX, Jump), contributors 19%, Foundation 16.5%, and the 51% community pool streams to the Foundation; ~332M APT (27%) still vests under it

Insiders received over 50%, or one organization directs over 30% todayhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Halting needs ~1/3 of 761M staked APT (~$190M), but a Foundation-led bloc decides governance and upgrades execute after a 3-day vote with no further exit window; one client (aptos-core).

Attack cost $10-100M, an unexploited soundness bug in the last 24 months, or upgrades by a security council or governance with under a 7-day exit windowmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

7 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$675.1M market cap (band 3), $82.8M/day median volume (band 4), no flags.

Mid-cap: $250M-1B market cap and $10M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

Mainnet since Oct 12, 2022 (4 years) with a ~5-hour network halt on Oct 18, 2023; no halt found since; APT is down ~96% from its Jan 2023 high

3-5 years, or a rollback, coordinated chain-wide halt or restart, or a $50M+ exploit in the last 5 yearshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

Only a pending US filing: Bitwise's spot Aptos ETF S-1 (Mar 5, 2025), last amended Aug 15, 2025, never listed; no other single-asset US filing found on EDGAR

OTC trust, non-US product, or a pending US filinghigh confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T3 Mixed, 3 gates are still open:

Score 32needs 40(open)
Value engine 1needs 2(open)
Adoption 1needs 2(open)
Supply 3gate 1(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Nov 12, 2026

Two-way ↘medium likelihood

Daily burn (~5.8K APT in Oct 2026) against the ~53K APT/day staking mint; fees above $5M/yr would lift revenue to 2
A framework release that enforces the 2.1B cap in code (proposal #183 was a text-only vote) and an on-chain, verifiable mechanism for the 210M APT lock
Fee revenue and DeFi TVL (~$43M, down ~95% in a year) against the ~9M transactions a day on Decibel
Governance concentration: a vote that a non-Foundation bloc decides, or any change to gas_price_to_burn (90) or the 2.6% reward rate
The Foundation buyback or reserve program floated in AIP-140, and progress on the stalled Bitwise S-1

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 75%

Aptos is a Move-based proof-of-stake network that launched in October 2022 and in 2026 repositioned itself around high-frequency trading, led by Decibel, a fully on-chain perpetuals exchange. Its 2026 tokenomics reset is visible on-chain: governance froze staking rewards at 2.6% a year, multiplied gas prices by ten, and the four-year vesting of investor and contributor tokens ended on October 12, which cuts scheduled monthly releases from about 11.3 million to about 4.5 million APT. Value still reaches holders only through the gas burn. Fees totalled about $1.2 million over the trailing year, and the roughly 2.1 million APT burned per year offsets about a tenth of the 19.5 million APT minted for stakers, about a fifth of each epoch's gas is re-minted to the proposing validator's pool, and supply grows about 1.5% a year net. The 2.1 billion APT hard cap approved in March was a signalling vote; the cap is not yet enforced in code. Control is concentrated: there was no public sale, the Foundation directs the community pool and about 27% of supply still vests under it, and governance outcomes are set by one large bloc of Foundation-linked stake. Transactions rose to about 9 million a day while DeFi deposits fell about 95% over the year. A US spot ETF filing from 2025 remains pending.

Structure (18 facts)

Chain: Aptos L1: Move VM with Block-STM parallel execution and BFT proof of stake (2-hour epochs); mainnet 2022-10-12. Framework at 0x1 is upgradeable by on-chain governance; ledger version 7.736B, block height 1.133B on 2026-10-23
What it is: general-purpose smart-contract L1 repositioned in 2026 as a 'global trading engine' around Decibel, a fully on-chain perpetuals order book (mainnet Feb 2026) incubated by Aptos Labs
Supply on chain: coin::supply<AptosCoin> = 1,210,504,426.6 APT on 2026-10-23 (1B minted at genesis plus net staking rewards); CoinGecko circulating 883.37M (73.0%). The paired fungible asset at 0xa and the coin aggregator both carry a u128 maximum, so no supply ceiling exists in state
Market cap (approx): $673,307,840
Emission: staking rewards newly minted each epoch via the framework MintCapability: StakingRewardsConfig on 2026-10-23 holds rewards_rate = min_rewards_rate = 2.6%/yr (per-epoch 5.936e-6 over 4,380 epochs), frozen since governance proposal #184 (executed 2026-03-16; previous 5.19% after AIP-119 cuts in 2025 from 6.79%). Sampled epoch mints 4,438-4,443 APT (2026-10-22/23), ~19.45M APT/yr, 1.61% of supply; staked 761.1M APT (62.9%)
Mint authority: no key: MintCapability<AptosCoin> lives in framework resources at 0x1 (stake, transaction_fee) and is used only by framework code; the framework can be replaced by any passed governance proposal (3-day vote, 300M APT quorum, 1M APT to propose, execution right after resolution)
Supply cap: AIP-140 (Aptos Foundation, Feb 18, 2026) promised a 2.1B hard cap; proposal #183 passed 335.18M yes / 1,540 no (created 2026-02-26) but its script is an 'empty governance proposal, used for voting only' and the metadata says 'code implementation will follow'; no cap exists in the mainnet framework on 2026-10-23
Fee mechanism: all gas burned at execution (transaction_fee::burn_fee). DISTRIBUTE_TRANSACTION_FEE (flag 97) is on: execution and IO gas priced above gas_price_to_burn = 90 octas/GU (set in proposal #185's execution config; minimum price 100) is re-minted at epoch end into the proposer's stake pool, capped at 20 APT per pool per epoch. Sampled re-mints: 84-112 APT per epoch (2026-10-22/23), ~19% of gross burn. Storage fees are refundable deposits. 10x gas schedule (AIP-141) live since proposal #185 (2026-03-19): min_transaction_gas_units 27.6M
Revenue: DefiLlama aptos chain fees: $1.19M trailing 365 days to 2026-10-23 vs $1.74M the year before (-31%); $141K in the last 30 days (~$1.7M/yr run rate). Burn: 174,210 APT in the 30 days to 2026-10-21 (~5.8K APT/day, ~2.1M APT/yr), ~1.9M APT cumulative since launch. Burn offsets ~11% of gross issuance; ~91M transactions/day would be needed to offset it at current fees
Distribution: genesis 1B: community 510.22M (51.02%, Foundation-directed: 125M at launch then 1/120 monthly), Foundation 165M (16.5%, 5M at launch then 1/120 monthly), core contributors 190M (19%) and investors 134.78M (13.48%, 1-year cliff then monthly to month 48, final release 2026-09-12, formally ended 2026-10-12). No public sale; Aptos Labs raised $200M (Mar 2022, a16z-led, ~$1B valuation) and $150M (Jul 2022, FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, ~$2B) in private rounds; the public first bought at exchange listings in Oct 2022. A testnet airdrop was small (about 2% of supply, figure not re-verified). AIP-140 says the Foundation held ~568M APT at mainnet (210M = ~37%). Named insider buckets are ~40% of all APT ever issued (~1.212B incl. ~1.9M burned); with the Foundation-held community pool, roughly 80%
Foundation control: ~331.7M APT (27.4% of supply) still vesting in the community and Foundation pools (DropsTab via Everstake, Sep 2026), released at ~4.54M APT/month to Oct 2032 and distributed at Foundation discretion; plus the 210M APT the Foundation pledged to stake permanently (AIP-140, 17.3% of supply; lock mechanism not published, overlap with the vesting pools unknown). A 2025 AIP author wrote that 'FDN/Labs own more than 90% of the staked APT'
Governance: stake-weighted on-chain votes; since 2025 every proposal read on-chain passed with ~307-381M APT yes and at most a few thousand APT against, or failed when the same-sized bloc voted no (#182 v1.41 upgrade 357.5M yes / 369.9M no; #193 31.3M yes / 387.3M no). Delegated voter 0xbc7c...3917 (proposer of the tokenomics proposals #183-185) directs 169.3M APT (22.2% of stake) across 17 staking-contract pools; a second unlabelled voter 0x17a2... directs 79.0M (10.4%); 50 delegation pools hold 462.7M (60.8%), their largest delegators holding round-number stakes of 5-17M APT
Security: 83 active validators on 2026-10-23, 83 distinct operators, largest pool 3.43% of stake; 14 pools exceed 1/3 and 36 exceed 2/3. Halting needs >1/3 of stake (~254M APT, ~$193M at spot), but voting and delegation are concentrated in Foundation-linked addresses. One network halt: ~5 hours on 2023-10-18 (block 104,621,314); none found since. AIP-139 deprecates validator full nodes to cut operator costs
Unlocks: monthly release on the ~12th: 11.31M APT/month until Sep 2026, ~4.54M APT/month from Oct 2026 to Oct 2032 (community 3.21M + Foundation 1.33M), ~0.5% of float per month; annual scheduled release falls from ~135.7M to ~54.5M APT
Usage: ~9M transactions/day in Sep 2026 (4.5M in Feb), concentrated on Decibel; DeFi TVL $42.8M on 2026-10-23 vs $665M a year earlier (Thala, Echelon, Aries, Amnis, Hyperion all down 90-99%); stablecoins $864M vs $1.62B a year earlier. APT's monetary role is gas only
Liquidity: 24h volume $42.3M (6.3% of market cap), 30-day average ~$82.7M (CoinGecko, 2026-10-23); listed on Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, OKX, Bybit
Institutional access: Bitwise Aptos ETF (CIK 2059135): S-1 2025-03-05, S-1/A 2025-06-26 and 2025-08-15, no ticker or listing as of 2026-10-23; no other single-asset US APT filing found on EDGAR; European staking ETPs exist (AUM not verified); no APT treasury company found
Roadmap: AIP-140 items still open: code enforcement of the 2.1B cap, a duration-weighted staking reward scheme, milestone-gated grants and a possible Foundation buyback or reserve; AIP-143 confidential APT and AIP-144 encrypted mempool in progress

Market figures at report date (Oct 23, 2026)

Price (approx): $0.762
All-time high / low: 19.92 (2023-01-26), now -96%; 3.24 on 2025-10-24, so -76% over 1y; 1y low 0.518

Sources (24)

Compare with

How the ranking works and how APT compares: see the full ranking. This entry as JSON:

GET https://tokens.10102.io/api/v1/tokenomics?symbol=APT