It's becoming clear that stablecoins are crypto's killer use case and being able to send digital US dollars instantly with minimal friction is hugely valuable and opens the door to payments, savings and more. And the cryptos that power these stablecoin use cases will have the most potential of all. Believe it or not, but it looks like Aptos could be at the top of this list and APT could become a top 5 crypto as a result.
And that's why today we're going to do a deep dive into Aptos, to bring you up to speed on what it's been up to, analyze APT's price action, and tell you where this crypto project could be headed next.
Table of Contents
What Is Aptos? How Does Aptos Work?
Aptos was technically founded by Meta back when it was known as Facebook. As some of you will know, Facebook tried to launch its own digital currency called Libra, which was later rebranded to Diem in 2019.
Diem was shut down in January 2022. Of course, it was because of regulations. Shortly before Diem was shut down, the team behind the project split into two and founded two crypto projects, Sui and Aptos. In the case of Aptos, two chaps named Mo Shaik and Avery Ching gathered some of Diem's best developers to found Aptos Labs in December 2021. The Aptos team subsequently raised $350 million from top crypto VCs across multiple funding rounds in 2022.
The full amount was likely much larger as some of the funding rounds were undisclosed. Notably, Binance invested in Aptos twice, increasing its initial investment because of Aptos' technology. Even more notably, two of these funding rounds included FTX, which of course imploded in November 2022.
In September 2023, the FTX bankruptcy estate was ordered to liquidate, i.e. sell, its altcoin holdings, including $137 million of APT, which works out to around about 33 million APT coins in total. It's not clear if all this APT has already been sold or if sales are still ongoing. In any case, Aptos' mainnet went live in October 2022.
There was a lot of controversy at launch, namely around its tokenomics, which were only revealed just before APT started trading on exchanges. Regardless, Aptos uses a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain that can process up to 160,000 transactions per second. According to its website, Aptos' highest recorded TPS is around 13,000.
What's interesting is that Aptos is technically faster than Solana as it has a block time of just around 200 milliseconds versus 400 milliseconds on Solana. But like Solana, Aptos has experienced outages. We'll come back to that a bit later.
Now, Aptos' speed is made possible due to a series of innovations such as parallel transaction execution and its modular design, which breaks down transaction processing into five steps. It's also made possible by the fact that Aptos is somewhat centralized. It has only 151 validator nodes, but over 500 full nodes.
This low validator count might have something to do with the fact that the minimum stake required to become an Aptos validator is million APT. That's more than 60 million dollars at the time of writing this post. Thankfully, delegation is possible with as little as 11 APT, but that's still around 140 dollars.
Whatever the case, APT staking rewards are currently around 7% for validators and delegators with a 14-day lockup and no slashing risk. Because all transaction fees are burned, this 7% staking reward comes from APT's inflation, which starts at 7% and will decline gradually until it reaches 3.5% in a few decades. Regarding tokenomics, APT had an initial supply of 1 billion, which was allocated as follows.
51% to the community, 19% to the team, which is based in the US, 16.5% to the Aptos Foundation, which is based in the Cayman Islands, and 13.5% to investors. Note the community allocation is held by the Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs, so this basically puts the team in control of over 85% of the initial supply. Investing schedule for APT can be seen below.
You'll notice that it's extremely aggressive, with most of APT's initial supply being unlocked between October 2022 and October 2026. It's worse than you think, because Aptos' tokenomics specified that the locked APT can be staked, and staking rewards, my friends, that can be sold.
Aptos, Google, Microsoft Partnership, Aptos Blockchain Outage
What's fascinating is that Aptos' adoption has only started really increasing over the past few months, but we'll get back to that in a bit.
Anyhow, in November 2022, Aptos partnered with Google Cloud, and this partnership is significant when you consider that Aptos partnered with Livepeer the next month. For context, Livepeer provides decentralized video streaming, Google owns YouTube, and again, Aptos was originally part of Facebook. Probably nothing.
Now, fast forward to February 2023, and this is when Aptos partnered with Chingari, a social media app with millions of users that's gaining popularity in India. Since that time, Chingari has become one of Aptos' most popular dApps, boasting almost 2.5 million monthly active users according to Dappradar. A few months later, Aptos Labs announced that the Petra wallet had launched mobile apps on Android and iOS.
For reference, Petra is the most popular Aptos wallet with 500,000 browser extension downloads. The mobile app has over 100,000 users on Android alone. We'll come back to Petra in a second.
In August 2023, Aptos partnered with Microsoft to combine AI, blockchain, and tradfi, a more reveal in an interview that Microsoft had approached Aptos. Now for those unfamiliar, usually crypto projects are the ones making the approaches to these kinds of partnerships. It's safe to say that Aptos' history helps in this regard, and this is where Petra comes back into the picture.
In September 2023, Petra integrated Coinbase Pay, and this is one of the many integrations Petra has done with crypto fiat on off-ramps, another notable one being MoonPay in November 2022. As you'll see, Aptos has been positioning Petra to be its payments hub. But before we get to that FOMO, we need to get through some FUD, and that's the aforementioned Aptos outage.
This occurred in October 2023 and lasted for five hours. A post-mortem report revealed that the issue was not related to transaction volume, but an error in how gas fees were coded. On that note, it's important to mention that Aptos is arguably a brand new blockchain, despite being technically in development since 2017 at Facebook.
Besides the fact that it only launched in 2020, it uses a new programming language called Move, wherein a vulnerability was discovered in May 2023. Now for some FOMO. In November 2023, a South Korean telecom company partnered with Aptos to launch a Web3 wallet.
FYI, Moe has mentioned in many interviews that Aptos wants to get more involved in Deepin, and is explicitly looking to create an environment where the quote next helium can emerge. Helium is one of the top Deepin projects for anyone wondering.
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Aptos USDT Integration, Aptos Card Payments
Speaking of wallets, another thing Aptos did in November 2023 was launch Identity Connect, a protocol that makes it possible to log into CryptoDApps by scanning QR codes using mobile wallets like Petra. In July this year, Aptos launched Keyless Wallets, making it easy to log into Web3 via Google using ZK Proofs. Back in February this year, Ondo Finance integrated with Aptos, bringing its yield-bearing USDY stablecoin to Aptos' Move-based blockchain in July.
Unfortunately, USDY hasn't gained that much traction, with Ondo Finance only contributing around $15 million worth of total value locked to Aptos' total value locked of over a billion dollars. Fortunately, Aptos continued to make progress on the Deepin front. It inked new partnerships with Microsoft, that South Korean telecoms company, and a hedge fund, Brevin Howard, to launch Aptos Ascend, an institutional DeFi platform in April this year.
Naturally, it comes with all sorts of compliance controls. In May, the announcements were even more bullish. First, Aptos announced that it had achieved sub-second transaction finality.
Then, Aptos hit an all-time high in user transactions of $115 million in a single day, apparently a record in crypto. And finally, Aptos integrated Chainlink's CCIP and data feeds.
I digress. Now, in June, Aptos partnered with media company NBCUniversal to introduce Web3 fan experiences and Web3 gaming to its ecosystem. You'll recall that Aptos seems to be leaning into decentralized streaming with Livepeer, and Mo himself has mentioned in a few interviews that Aptos is interested in the media-related use cases.
Case in point, Aptos partnered with streaming platform Myco in August. Probably nothing indeed. July is where things get interesting.
Aptos tabled a proposal to launch Aave on its move-based blockchain. And this still seems to be in progress, which is odd given that the proposal passed four months ago. Hold that thought, we'll come back to it shortly.
In August, Tether expanded its USDT stablecoin to Aptos. What's fascinating is that Aptos didn't have any native stablecoins until this USDT expansion. It was only recently announced that native USDC would be launching on its blockchain, like literally a couple of weeks ago in November.
This is fascinating because you'd think that stablecoin issuers would be rushing to integrate with Aptos. If we're not mistaken, this is just because Aptos technically didn't have fungible token standards until August this year. And this underscores the fact that Aptos is new and still in development.
Don't forget that. In September, Aptos held its Aptos Experience Conference in South Korea. And this is where the interesting stuff around Aave comes back into the picture.
There were many big announcements made at the conference, but the most significant of these was Aptos' pivot to focusing on crypto payments. In short, Aptos is launching the Aptos Card, a metal debit card that's analogous to crypto.com's famous metal debit cards. The difference is that Aptos Card functions as a de facto hardware wallet, and it's paired with the Petra Mobile wallet via tap.
As you might have guessed, the Aptos Card will use USDT and APT. What you might not have guessed, though, is that Petra will also be launching an Earn feature alongside its Pay feature, which can be used independently of the Aptos Card. Logically, the Earn feature will plug into a DeFi protocol on Aptos on the back end, where USDT and other cryptos will be lent out to earn a yield.
Newsflash, but Aave is a DeFi lending and borrowing protocol. The fact that it's the best known and the most reputable theoretically makes it the ideal back end for Aptos' de facto savings account. In practice, however, Aptos could use a DeFi protocol that's native to its chain instead.
We'll have to wait and see. Now in October and November, the adoption of Aptos suddenly accelerated. First, Franklin Templeton launched a tokenized money market fund on Aptos.
Then BlackRock launched its tokenized Biddle fund there too. And finally, Bitwise launched a staked Aptos ETP in Europe, foreshadowing more ETPs and maybe ETFs. Meanwhile, the total value locked in Aptos' DeFi protocols surged above one billion dollars for the first time.
And this is not surprising given the broader crypto market rally and all the Aptos updates we just mentioned. What is surprising is that a lot of this TVL increase has come from USDT's growth on Aptos, foreshadowing further USDT growth. As a cherry on top, Stripe, one of the world's largest payment processors, recently announced that it would be expanding USDC payments to Aptos.
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APT Price Analysis And Prediction
This brings me to the moment you've all been waiting for. And that's Apt's price action and potential. As you can see, Apt's long-term price action doesn't look that impressive.
In fact, it's trading around the same price it was when we last covered the project. And this begs the question of why Apt has underperformed so badly. The answer can be seen when we look at Apt through the lens of market cap. Even though Apt's price has effectively stayed static, its market cap has continued to grow.
What does this mean?
Well, it means that Apt's supply has been growing exponentially, something that can be confirmed by historical data. Archives from CoinMarketCap reveal that Apt's supply has increased by almost five times since it launched.
That's over 400 million Apt to be exact. And if we assume an average price of about $10 per Apt during that time, this means that Apt experienced up to $4 billion of sell pressure, up to $165 million per day. It goes without saying that this selling has probably suppressed Apt's price action.
And the worst part is that practically all this sell pressure is coming from insiders, almost all of whom are staking their locked Apt's since 88% of total supply is staked. Chances are they've been steadily selling their staking rewards. At the same time, the demand side of Apt's equation has been almost non-existent until recently.
Analytics from the Aptoscan Explorer reveal that all kinds of metrics, like new wallets created, only started rising in the last couple of months, specifically around September. Before that, well, almost nothing. The silver lining is that demand for APT is in fact rising, and it's rising fast.
In case it wasn't clear enough, Aptos seems to be positioning itself for stablecoin payments using Tether's USDT. And in case you haven't noticed, entities affiliated with Tether will play a central role in Trump's upcoming administration. This is a reference to Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the US broker which handles the reserves back in USDT.
Howard has been working closely with the Trump administration and even came up with the DOGE acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk.
Now, given these connections, it stands to reason that any upcoming regulations about stablecoins and crypto payments will be favorable to USDT. In turn, this sets the stage for Aptos to capture lots of market share in the US by offering USDT payments and savings via its Petra wallet and other dApps and apps. Combine Aptos's connections to big players like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and it's easy to see how APT could melt the faces of this crypto bull market.
In our view, Aptos is following Solana one cycle behind, just like Sui. To put things into perspective, Sol hit a market cap of around $80 billion in 2021. This means that APT could hit a market cap of around $80 billion in 2025, which would translate to a gain of around 10 times from here if you factor in all the vesting.
The caveat, though, is that all this vesting could be much worse because staking rewards on locked APT can be sold, and this could bring the APT's gains closer to around seven or eight times. On the flip side, though, the fact that Aptos has strategically positioned itself for crypto payments and savings with the largest stablecoin and has been pending partnerships with the who's who of TradFi suggests APT could go much higher than 10 times. Let's just say it's too early to start speculating on that possibility.
Price Prediction Table
| Year | Price Prediction |
|---|---|
| 2023 | $4.00 - $10.00 |
| 2025 | $10.00 - $80.00 |
| 2030 | $50.00 - $150.00 |
Aptos Roadmap For 2025 And Beyond
Anyhow, whether APT can pull a 10x or more depends on Aptos's upcoming milestones. Although Aptos does not have an official roadmap, many official milestones were revealed at that Aptos Experience event in September. We already discussed a few of these, PetraPay, PetraEarn, and the Aptos card.
Other official milestones were revealed in two presentations. The first of these was about transactions on Aptos, and it revealed that Aptos will soon be undergoing a two-part upgrade called Raptor, which will take its official blockchain to the theoretical limits of crypto speed in 2025, 1 million TPS with low latency. The second presentation was about what Aptos had been doing with the Move programming language.
Obviously, Aptos will be introducing Move 2.0, and it will add technical stuff that's quite frankly outside the scope of this post. In short, it will make the Move programming language more efficient for things like DeFi. Additional upcoming milestones for Aptos can be found in interviews with Mo and Avery, which you'll recall are the co-founders of Aptos.
In a September interview, Avery declared that the team had finished building most of Aptos's infrastructure, and that providing products is the next area of focus. This was echoed by Mo in an interview he did with Yours Truly in October, wherein he said that Aptos was quote going back to its roots, and this is in reference to Libra aka Diem, which was originally designed for payments. Now this highlights the fact that Aptos is suddenly hyper-focused on payments.
Our research suggests that this is something that happened over the summer, shortly before USDT launched on its chain, which would kind of make sense. Almost every unofficial milestone seems to involve payments. For example, in that same September interview, Avery said that Aptos wants to introduce quote streaming payments, which will presumably be leveraged by whatever decentralized streaming stuff they're working on.
It also goes hand in hand with telco-related use cases, where Aptos is also quite active. All we're wondering is whether Aptos isn't accidentally ushering in a dystopia. Now for instance, Mo told that Aptos could someday host central bank digital currencies or CBDCs, which control your money.
It doesn't help that Aptos has been working on stuff like digital ID with Silicon Valley tech giants. Aptos is even working to help stamp online content as being AI-generated or genuine. That is a bit scary.
The Challenges Aptos Faces
The first challenge is one that's not talked about enough, and that's development. Now don't get me wrong, Aptos has lots of developers, over 800 monthly active devs to be exact.
The challenge lies in the fact that we're fundamentally dealing with a brand new blockchain that's using a brand new programming language, at least relative to its competitors. As we've seen, technical issues have been discovered, not just at the blockchain layer, but also at the application layer with the programming language. If Aptos succeeds in becoming the number one chain for USDT payments and there's a technical issue, it could be devastating for not just APT but the entire crypto market.
Aside from the domino effect this would have on DeFi, it would do serious damage to crypto's reputation, which already isn't that high. Never mind the fact that Aptos has been gradually introducing things it should have done from the start, such as delegated staking and fungible token standards. And this ties into Aptos's second challenge, and that's adoption.
Just because crypto is fast, cheap, and uses cutting-edge tech doesn't guarantee that it will gain traction. This is something we've seen time and time again in crypto, and Aptos's admittedly short track record suggests it's been struggling in this regard. To be fair, Aptos's adoption seems to be rising fast, but it's easy to assume that exponential trends will continue, particularly in crypto.
The traction that Aptos has gained in recent weeks could slow down, particularly if competitors start offering competing products and services. Think Solana offering PYUSD payments and savings via PayPal, which is the world's largest payment processor by some metrics. From our perspective, there's currently nothing that makes Aptos stand out from the competition.
Even if it is technically faster and cheaper, does the end user really notice or even care? Next generation cryptos like Solana, Sui, and even Ethereum Layer 2s like Base offer a nearly identical user experience. And this relates to Aptos's third challenge, and that's its tokenomics. Funnily enough, tokenomics is the one thing that makes Aptos stand out from the competition, and not in a good way.
Anyone who doesn't know what market cap is will look at APT's price cringe and move on to the next crypto on their list. While it is likely that most of the APT that was sold went towards funding development, it came at the cost of seriously suppressed price action. The fact of the matter is that price action is where adoption begins.
It's ultimately the price action that gets people interested in actually using a crypto blockchain. The good news is that Aptos probably knows this and could ease off on the APT selling so that its prices rise and the project gets some more exposure. The bad news is that Aptos has been dragging its feet in more ways than one while the competition has been sprinting ahead, leaving APT in the dust.
With all that said though, there's no denying that Aptos is one of the many large caps that is perfectly positioned for a potential revenge rally. The difference is that APT's upside is much higher than most large caps, simply because it's positioned itself to capitalize on crypto's killer use case. In case you forgot, that's stablecoins, which can be used for payments, savings, and other use cases that could result in genuine mass adoption.
Considering the connections that Aptos has, it's not far-fetched to say that it could someday become the most popular blockchain for USDT, crypto's largest stablecoin. Now consider the indirect influence that Tether could have on US crypto regulations next year via Cantor Fitzgerald. It looks like the red carpet will be rolled out for stablecoin payments, with USDT and Aptos walking arm in arm, while retail investors and institutions FOMO into APT. We will find out soon enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Aptos?
Aptos is a high-performance blockchain designed for stablecoin transactions and other financial applications.
What are the key features of Aptos?
Aptos boasts fast transaction speeds, strategic partnerships, and a focus on stablecoin integration.
What challenges does Aptos face?
Aptos faces challenges related to centralization, technical issues, and competition in the blockchain space.
What is the price prediction for Aptos?
Price predictions for Aptos vary, with estimates ranging from $4 to $150 by 2030 based on market conditions and adoption.
Conclusion
Aptos is strategically positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for stablecoin transactions. With its innovative features and strong partnerships, it has the potential to become a major player in the cryptocurrency market. However, it must address its challenges to unlock its full potential. As the crypto landscape evolves, Aptos's future will be closely watched by investors and analysts alike.