Aptos is burning substantially more APT as higher transaction fees and heavy onchain trading increase the amount of tokens removed through network activity. The official APT supply dashboard recorded 168,633 APT burned during the latest 30-day period, against approximately 1.5 million APT of monthly staking emissions, meaning transaction fees are now offsetting roughly 11% of gross issuance. Aptos has permanently burned about 2 million APT since mainnet launched in October 2022.
The shift follows a tokenomics overhaul first outlined by the Aptos Foundation in February and subsequently implemented through governance. Tokenholders approved a 2.1 billion APT maximum supply, reduced annual staking rewards from 5.19% to 2.6% and increased the gas schedule tenfold in March. Those changes reduced new issuance while making every unit of network activity economically more meaningful to the existing fee-burn mechanism.
Decibel Turns Trading Activity Into APT Burns
Decibel has become an important part of that equation. The perpetual exchange runs its order book, matching, margining and settlement on Aptos, meaning order placement, cancellation and execution generate onchain transactions that pay gas. Because Aptos burns 100% of transaction fees, Decibel’s high-frequency activity directly contributes to APT destruction rather than simply generating application-level trading volume. The exchange has been live on mainnet since February.
Blockworks Research estimated in October that trailing daily burn value had risen roughly 14-fold from early-2026 levels, while daily transactions increased from about 4.5 million before the March fee change to around 10 million on average afterward. The network reached substantially higher periods during the summer, including a reported 13.2 million-transaction day in July. The 10x gas increase did not produce a corresponding tenfold transaction cost burden: median fees remained around $0.0003 in the research period.
Those activity levels are supported by ongoing execution upgrades. Aptos recently made Block-STM v2 its default mainnet execution engine, improving how conflicting parallel workloads are scheduled without establishing a specific increase in production TPS by itself. The network has also activated an encrypted mempool for optional pre-execution transaction privacy. These upgrades expand execution capacity and trading infrastructure, but actual burn still depends on transactions being submitted and paying gas.
APT Supply Is Still Growing
The higher burn rate has not yet made APT deflationary. Aptos’ November 2 dashboard reports about 1.4 million APT of net new supply per month after burns, with total existing supply around 1.2 billion APT. Reaching net deflation would require burns to exceed staking issuance, a threshold the network remains materially below today. Blockworks estimated that, under the transaction mix it studied, roughly ten times the then-current Decibel-style activity would be needed to reach that crossover.
Supply pressure is nevertheless changing from another direction. Investor and core-contributor vesting reaches the end of its four-year schedule in October 2026. Blockworks estimates annual scheduled unlocks fall from roughly 135 million APT in 2026 to about 21 million thereafter, primarily from remaining Foundation and community allocations. Unlocks and staking emissions are separate mechanisms: declining vesting reduces tokens becoming liquid under existing allocations, while staking rewards continue creating new APT.
The result is a materially different token-supply profile rather than completed deflation. Aptos now combines lower staking issuance, a maximum supply parameter and higher fee burns with growing financial activity, including an ecosystem where stablecoin balances have surpassed $1.1 billion. For APT to move from slower inflation to actual supply contraction, sustained transaction demand will still have to push fee burns above ongoing staking rewards.
Liam Foster follows crypto markets from France, with a close eye on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Layer 1 assets, derivatives, sentiment and smart money flows. His coverage looks past the daily price move to understand what is happening underneath: liquidity, leverage, positioning and the behavior of larger players.
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