On October 12, Aptos will conclude the four-year vesting schedule for its early backers and core contributors, cutting planned monthly APT releases by roughly 60% — from 11.31 million tokens to 4.54 million.

Core contributors and early backers received their final tranche on September 12

The last monthly tranche for both groups was delivered on September 12, 2026. The Aptos Foundation treats the fourth anniversary of the October 2022 mainnet launch as the formal end of the vesting cycle.

Vesting calendars for insider allocations are among the most closely watched supply variables in crypto tokenomics, since they determine when otherwise restricted tokens become part of circulating supply. At genesis, core contributors were allocated 190 million APT, while early backers received 134.78 million. Together that amounts to 324.78 million tokens, or 32.48% of the 1 billion APT minted at launch. Each grant carried a 12-month cliff, followed by monthly vesting through month 48. The two groups collectively absorbed 6.77 million of the 11.31 million APT unlocked each month.

Going forward, only the 4.54 million APT per month directed to the Community and Aptos Foundation pools will continue to enter circulation, with distributions scheduled to run until 2032. Those pools release 1/120 of their remaining balance each month, a formula that automatically shrinks the monthly amount as the pools wind down toward their 2032 end date.

On an annualized basis, planned releases will fall from approximately 135.7 million APT to 54.5 million. The Aptos Foundation projected the same 60% reduction in its February 18 tokenomics update, and said its grant distributions will decline by more than 50% from 2026 to 2027.

A further 331.69 million APT from the genesis supply remains locked in vesting, all of it within the Community and Foundation pools. As of September 30, APT's circulating supply stood at 871.02 million tokens, against a total supply of roughly 1.2 billion.

Staking at 2.6% now mints about 19.8 million tokens a year

Staking rewards are now the primary source of new APT, with issuance flowing to the staked capital that helps secure the chain — the standard design for proof-of-stake networks. The annual reward rate has declined from 5.19% to 2.6%.

Approximately 763 million APT — about 63% of all tokens — is currently staked with validators. At the 2.6% rate, that stake mints roughly 19.8 million APT per year, and unstaking takes up to 14 days.

Transaction fees on the network are entirely burned. From launch through mid-September 2026, the network burned around 1.9 million APT. The same overhaul saw gas fees jump tenfold, though the Aptos Foundation said stablecoin transfers still cost around $0.00014.

Overhanging all of this is a hard cap of 2.1 billion APT. Proposal #183 passed onchain with 335.2 million APT voting in favor and around 1,500 voting against. The mainnet minted 1 billion APT at launch, and staking rewards added another 196 million by February, leaving 904 million APT of headroom under the cap — more than four decades of buffer at the current issuance pace of roughly 19.8 million APT a year.

The Aptos Foundation has also committed to locking up and permanently staking 210 million APT, which it said would never be sold or distributed. That stake represents about 37% of the Foundation's mainnet holdings, and its rewards fund Foundation operations.

Aptos currently hosts around $723 million in real-world assets, with Franklin Templeton and BlackRock operating tokenized funds on the network, as Cryptopolitan reported in January. On January 14, Bitnomial launched the first regulated APT futures in the United States.