Aptos H1 2025: The Global Trading Engine Accelerates

Key Insights

• Momentum across the Aptos ecosystem continues to advance the vision of a “Global Trading Engine,” supported by DeFi growth, protocol innovations, and new infrastructure, most recently Decibel, a fully onchain trading protocol built on Aptos.
• Aptos’ stablecoin market cap increased 85.9% in the first half of the year from $648.9 million to $1.2 billion at Q2 close, driven by market cap increases in USDT and USDC.
• The average transaction fee on Aptos decreased 61.1% QoQ to 0.00011 APT ($0.00052) in Q2, roughly 10-100x cheaper than other top Layer-1 blockchains like TRON, Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and BNB Smart Chain.
• In June, co-developers Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto introduced Shelby, a hot storage protocol for data availability designed to deliver Web2-grade low latency with sub-second reads and high-throughput storage suitable for real-time, read-intensive Web3 applications.
• Baby Raptr, the first production-stage component of Aptos’ next-generation BFT consensus protocol Raptr, improves validator finality latency by 20% (100-150ms) and went live on Aptos mainnet in June.

Primer

Aptos (APT) is a Layer-1 blockchain designed around the core tenets of scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradeability. Aptos was born out of Meta’s Diem and Novi projects, eventually launching in October 2022. Core developer Aptos Labs raised about $400 million in two 2022 private investor rounds.

Aptos’ technological stack features many novel aspects, including the AptosBFTv4 consensus mechanism, the Quorum Store mempool protocol, the Block-STM parallel execution engine, and the programming language Move. Aptos Move, which builds on the original Move language created by the Diem and Novi teams, offers enhanced flexibility and safety compared to other Web3 programming languages. Aptos Move is being co-developed by multiple protocols.

Other key features aim to improve user experience and safeguards, including accounts where private keys are decoupled from public keys, transaction pre-execution to explain the outcome of a transaction before a user signs it, and transaction expiration time and sequence numbers. Development of the Aptos network and growth of the Aptos ecosystem is primarily led by Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation. For a full primer on Aptos, refer to our Initiation of Coverage report.

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Key Metrics

Financial Analysis

APT’s circulating market cap decreased by 34.9% in H1 to $3.2 billion, while its market cap rank dropped one spot to 31. APT’s price dropped 43.7% in H1 from $8.70 to $4.90, as token unlocks continued in H1, detailed further below. For comparison, other top networks had mixed results in H1, with BTC’s circulating market cap up 15.1%, while ETH and SOL declined 25.2% and 8.6% respectively. Notably, in March, Bitwise filed an S-1 with the SEC to register an APT ETF. APTB, Bitwise’s Aptos Staking Exchange-Traded Product (ETP), began trading on the Swiss exchange SIX in November 2024.

Aptos revenue, i.e., all fees collected by the protocol, fell by 51.9% QoQ to $214,400 in Q2. This followed a 25.4% QoQ decline from a peak of $598,000 in revenue in Q4 to $446,000 in Q1. Currently, Aptos burns all revenue generated, though these burned tokens have not significantly offset inflation.

Aptos’ genesis supply includes the 1 billion APT initially allocated but not staking rewards. At Q2 close, 49.2% of the genesis supply had unlocked, a 7.4% QoQ increase.

From April 2024 through September 2026, 11.31 million APT (1.1% of the genesis supply) unlock on the 12th day of each month as follows:

• Ecosystem: 3.2 million APT (28.3% of monthly unlock). Unlocked ecosystem tokens are not necessarily immediately distributed upon becoming liquid. Note that before any distribution, 80% of these tokens were held by the Foundation and 20% by Aptos Labs. These tokens are used for grants, incentives, and other initiatives.
• Team: 4.0 million APT (35.4% of monthly unlock).
• Foundation: 1.3 million APT (11.5% of monthly unlock). The Foundation plans to use these tokens to host events, fund legal support, sponsor research, and more.
• Private Investors: 2.8 million APT (24.8% of monthly unlock). Notably, FTX Ventures participated in Aptos Labs’ first fundraising round and co-led its second.

At the end of Q2, 76.4% of the eligible supply was staked (+1.3% QoQ). Because locked tokens can still be staked and earn liquid staking rewards, the supply eligible to be staked is APT’s total supply rather than its circulating supply.

In addition to APT supply unlocks, Aptos has inflationary APT staking rewards. These rewards began at a 7% annualized rate based on the initial total supply of 1 billion APT, and were initially set to decrease by 1.5% each year until reaching 3.5%.

However, on June 21, AIP-119 was executed, immediately lowering the staking reward rate APR by 0.25% to 6.54%, as part of the AIP’s seven-month schedule to reduce the reward rate to 5.26% over the next seven months. Motivations behind reducing the staking rewards rate include aligning the staking yield with other competitor L1s like Ethereum, incentivizing restaking and DeFi activities, and reducing token inflation.

Network Analysis

Usage

Network activity, measured by transactions and active addresses, declined in Q2 after increasing in Q1. In Q2, average daily transactions and active addresses declined QoQ by 8.7% to 3.2 million and 22.1% to 904,800, respectively. Prior to this, average daily active addresses peaked at 1.2 million in Q1 (+55.8% QoQ), while average daily transactions increased 7.2% QoQ to 3.5 million. Average daily transactions peaked at 7.1 million in Q3 2024, due to a record-breaking spike to 326.3 million transactions on Aug. 15, following the launch of Tapos Game #2, a tap-to-earn game where players click to make a cat jump. Aptos finished Q3 2024 with the third-highest daily average transactions among L1s, trailing only Solana and Tron. In July, Aptos surpassed 3 billion in lifetime transactions, with more than 3.1 billion to date.

Battle RPG game Defi Cattos led Aptos smart contracts activity in Q2, averaging 339,660 daily interactions, followed by the AptosFramework contract, which averaged 149,160, and Kratos Gamer Network (KGeN), which averaged 110,290.

In Q1 2025, the average transaction fee increased 111.3% QoQ to 0.00027 APT($0.0014). Thereafter in Q2 it decreased 61.1% QoQ to 0.00011 APT ($0.00052), roughly 10-100x cheaper than other top L1 blockchains like TRON, Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and BNB Smart Chain.
Monthly active users (MAU), defined as the number of unique sending or receiving addresses over a 30-day period, stayed above 10 million throughout the first half of 2025, maintaining the growth in H2 2024 when MAU steadily increased from 2.5 million in July 2024 to 10 million in December 2024.

In Q1 2025, average daily new addresses increased 76.6% QoQ to 328,000 followed by a 59.0% QoQ decline in Q2 to 134,500. The retention rate is the percentage of addresses that remain active for a given time period after initially being active. In Q1 2025, the average one-month retention rate was 25.7%, down 7.5 percentage points from 33.2% in Q4 2024. In Q2 2025, the average one-month retention rate was 25.4%, only 0.3 percentage points lower than Q1 2025.

Security and Decentralization

Aptos closed Q2 with 877.9 million in staked APT (+2.4% QoQ), though staked APT denominated in USD declined 4.8% QoQ to $4.3 billion. Still, Aptos closed Q2 as the ninth-largest network by staked market cap. Notably, Aptos does not have a slashing mechanism and allows locked tokens (currently ~50% of the genesis supply) to be staked to earn liquid rewards.

Active validators on Aptos continued to grow, up 3.4% QoQ to an all-time high quarterly close of 152 validators. About half of the validators accept in-protocol delegated stake, a feature that launched near the end of April 2023. The majority of stake for the other validators comes from out-of-protocol delegation from the Aptos Foundation and private investors’ locked tokens. The Aptos Foundation holds a majority of the total supply between its own allocation and the tokens on behalf of the Ecosystem allocation. As such, it can help distribute stake more equally among validators. As a result, Aptos has a Nakamoto coefficient of 18 (flat QoQ), which is above the median of other networks.

Upgrades and Roadmap

Aptos is designed to support frequent protocol upgrades. This ability stems from validator management occurring onchain, allowing validators to easily sync to a new upgrade. Parts of Aptos are also written in Move, which can improve the time-to-market for developers.

The Aptos protocol continued upgrading in H1 to 1.25.0 through to 1.30.2. These upgrade series implemented several Aptos Improvement Proposals (AIPs), as well as improvements to the Aptos blockchain, some of the most notable of which are detailed below:

• Aptos mainnet framework version 1.27.1 (upgraded to on March 15, 2025) implemented AIP-104, allowing for custom Move code for account authentication, and AIP-107, which makes Aptos run ~2x faster than prior implementations by sharing code caches across multiple blocks rather than reloading each time. Additionally, AIP-103 was implemented, adding safety controls to smart contracts, such as setting spending limits on how much APT can be withdrawn.
• AIP-110 was implemented on March 22, 2025, reducing the threshold for passing a governance proposal on Aptos from 400 million APT (34.8% of the total token supply) to 300 million APT (26.1% of the total token supply).
• Aptos mainnet framework version 1.29.0 (upgraded to on June 2, 2025) implemented AIP-115, introducing stateless accounts. All accounts after this upgrade also use the fungible asset (FA) store rather than the legacy coin store, which uses move objects rather than account resources and does not require account registration before an asset can be received. Dispatchable Fungible Assets (DFAs) build on FA, allowing issuers to attach custom Move functions that automatically execute during token transfers. Examples include interest or staking rewards automatically accruing during transfer with no claim step, and enforcing vote-escrowed lockups or delegation rules at the asset layer.
• Aptos mainnet framework version 1.30.0 (upgraded to on June 20, 2025) introduced orderless (“turbo”) transactions, which enable parallel execution at the transaction level by allowing transactions to be processed without strict sequence order via unique nonces, removing the one-by-one execution queue.

Performance and Scaling Developments

With block times under 130ms and user finality of 650ms, Aptos is already one of the most performant Layer-1 blockchains as it scales towards its vision as the hub of global transactions supporting 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

In September 2024, Aptos Labs introduced Raptr, its next-generation BFT consensus protocol that implements the prefix consensus model to settle 260,000 transactions per second (TPS) with less than 800ms latency. Under this design, validators disseminate batches of data and leaders optimistically propose these batches before getting the corresponding proofs of availability. When a validator gets a block proposal, it can choose to vote only on a prefix of the batches it has received. As a result, and enabled by Raptr’s algorithmic innovations, validators can form quorum certificates and commit partial blocks for batches approved by a quorum of validators.

Baby Raptr, the first production-stage component of Raptr, went live on Aptos mainnet in June, with rollout to replace the AptofBFTv4 consensus mechanism in progress as of June 30. Baby Raptr (aka Optimistic Quorum Store) is a technique to reduce Quorum Store and Consensus (QS+Consensus) latency from six network hops to four, improving validator finality latency by 20% (100-150ms).

Further upgrades to reduce latency and boost throughput on Aptos include the Block-STM V2 upgrade of Aptos’ Block-STM parallel execution engine, as well as Zaptos and Shardines.

• Zaptos: Aptos employs a pipelined architecture that allows different stages of different blocks to execute in parallel, maximizing resource utilization and thereby improving blockchain performance. Zaptos significantly reduces the end-to-end latency of Aptos’ pipelined architecture through three key optimizations:
  • Optimistic Execution: A given validator adds the block to the pipeline immediately rather than waiting for an order to do so.
  • Optimistic Execution: Blocks are optimistically committed to storage as soon as execution is completed.
  • Piggybacking state certification on Consensus: Validators can start the certification stage of an executive block before waiting for the block to be ordered (in parallel with the last round of consensus).

In a testing environment, Aptos Labs found Zaptos reduces latency by 40% under a load of 20,000 transactions per second.

• Shardines: Shardines introduces a horizontally scaled execution engine that divides transactions into smaller partitions, which are processed in parallel across multiple nodes. This allows the network to handle more transactions simultaneously, boosting transaction processing speed. In testing, this approach enabled Aptos to achieve 1 million TPS with 30 shards. Central to this implementation is a hypergraph partitioning algorithm designed to minimize cross-shard network communication and wait times, along with a ‘micro-batching and pipelining‘ strategy that splits transactions within a block into smaller batches, which are then pipelined through various execution stages in Aptos’s parallel execution environment.

Decibel

On Aug. 5, Decibel, a permissionless trading engine built for speed, scale, and composability, launched on the Aptos blockchain. Developed by Aptos Labs in collaboration with the newly formed Decibel Foundation, Decibel supports both spot and perpetuals trading through a unified, cross-margin account and is powered by Aptos’ framework-level central limit order book (CLOB). Designed to deliver speed and performance on par with centralized exchanges, all matching and settlement occur entirely onchain. Decibel’s open and composable design enables anyone to participate in earning trading fees and supporting liquidations.

This launch represents a significant step forward for Aptos DeFi, introducing protocol-level infrastructure purpose-built for multicollateral support, real-world asset (RWA) trading, and capital-efficient strategies. Decibel is currently live on Devnet, with a Mainnet launch expected in early 2026.

Shelby

On June 24, Shelby, a hot storage protocol for data availability co-developed by Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto, was announced. Shelby is designed to deliver Web2-grade low-latency with sub-second reads and high-throughput storage suitable for real-time, read-intensive Web3 applications. Shelby’s coordination and settlement is on Aptos, though the underlying storage functionality is chain-agnostic. The protocol runs via nodes connected by a fiber-optic network that will be rewarded in real-time for providing data. Shelby is chain-agnostic. Developers can request early access to Shelby by completing a form on the Shelby website. Shelby’s devnet is expected to go live in Q4 2025, with a public testnet released thereafter.

Ecosystem Overview

DeFi

While Aptos’ DeFi TVL closed H1 effectively flat at $1 billion, it maintained the growth it had in Q4 2024 from its prior TVL range of $300-500 million, to $981.9 million at Q4 2024 close. In contrast, Aptos’ DeFi TVL in APT increased 87.9% in H1 from 112.9 million APT at Q4 2024 close to 212.2 million at Q2 2025 close. This reflects both the 44% decline in the price of APT in H1 2025 and the increasing share of stablecoins and other assets like BTC in Aptos DeFi TVL. marking sustained growth from the network’s prior TVL range of $300-500 million from late March to mid-September 2024

The TVL of Hyperion, a hybrid orderbook and concentrated liquidity AMM DEX, increased 19x QoQ from $6.5 million at Q1 close to $125.8 million at Q2 close, making it the 4th largest protocol by TVL on Aptos as of June 30. Hyperion launched in February and in July completed the token generation event (TGE) for its native token RION, the first exclusive bonding curve-based TGE in the Aptos ecosystem on Binance. RION can be staked for xRION, which is used to govern Hyperion.

The QoQ change in TVL of other top protocols was mixed, ranging from a 45% decline to 38.5% growth, reflecting multiple factors, including changes in asset prices, new incentive programs, new feature launches, and shifting user behavior.

• Aries Markets: Like in Q1, Aries Markets, a multi-use DeFi protocol, closed Q2 2025 as the leading protocol by TVL on Aptos, though TVL fell 24.9% QoQ from $383.6 million to $288.1 million. On July 21, WBTC went live on Aptos via Stargate with Aries Markets adding support for the asset immediately thereafter.
• Echo Protocol: Echo Protocol, a Bitcoin liquidity protocol, followed Aries Markets as the second-largest protocol by TVL, up 38.5% QoQ to $285.1 million (~2,661 BTC), due in large part to BTC’s 28% appreciation QoQ. Users can mint aBTC on Aptos by bridging uBTC, which is backed 1:1 by BTC, from the B^2 Network. Echo’s lending application allows users to permissionlessly deposit aBTC, USDT, USDC, and APT to earn interest and borrow those assets against deposits. On July 2, Echo launched its reward and governance token ECHO, which uses vote escrow to determine ECHO reward emissions to its liquidity pools. As of July 25, $447.5 million in BTC is issued on Aptos. Following aBTC, other wrapped Bitcoin products on Aptos include SBTC bridged via LayerZero, xBTC bridged via OKX Bridge, WBTC bridged via LayerZero OFT, and whWBTC bridged via Wormhole.
• Echelon: Echelon, a permissionless money market for asset lending and borrowing, closed Q2 with the third-most TVL on Aptos at $131.2 million, down 29.8% QoQ from $187.0 million at Q1 close. In February, Echelon announced a partnership with Ethena to support the adoption and integration of Ethena’s sUSDe within the Echelon lending markets. As of June 30, more than $49 million sUSDE is supplied on Echelon.
• Thala Labs: Thala Labs features three core products: Thala AMM, the MOD stablecoin, and thAPT (liquid staking). The protocol’s TVL excluding liquid staking increased 22.7% QoQ from $77.9 million to $95.5 million. On July 6, Thala announced the completion of an audit for its upcoming Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) implementation. Prior to this, in April, the protocol introduced xLPT, which represents a user’s staked position accruing rewards. xLPT uses the Dispatichble Fungible Asset (DFA) standard to automatically accrue rewards whenever transferred, deposited, or withdrawn.
• Cellana Finance: Cellana Finance, a decentralized exchange that uses the vote escrow Ve(3,3) economic model to determine liquidity reward incentives, closed Q2 with $26.4 million in TVL (-29.6% QoQ).

All other protocols had $87.1 million in TVL at Q2 close, down 29.6% QoQ from $123.7 million. Some other notable protocols include:

• Kana Labs: Kana Labs is an AMM DEX aggregator and perpetual futures protocol. Kana Perps launched on June 11, becoming the first fully onchain CLOB-based perps DEX on Aptos. Volume hit a high of $17.7 million on June 17.
• Tapp Exchange: Launched on mainnet in June, Tapp Exchange is the first modular DEX on Aptos. Developers can use Tapp’s Hooks architecture to program logic for swaps, yield strategies, or specific conditions directly at the protocol layer. Tapp Exchange intends to release a number of additional offerings, including TAPP.BOT, a Telegram trading bot, and automated liquidity management.
• Merkle Trade: Merkle Trade is a permissionless perpetual futures contract trading protocol built on Aptos that offers crypto asset, foreign exchange, and commodity trading. Through its Walletless feature, users can trade without a wallet, instead signing with credentials like Google. Moreover, transactions are sponsored via the Aptos Foundation’s Gas Station program, enabling users to trade without paying network gas fees.

Additionally, Ekiden is an upcoming orderbook-based hybrid exchange on Aptos. The protocol will use an offchain Central Limit Orderbook (CLOB) with deferred onchain settlement to maximize performance for both spot and perpetual futures trading.

On June 27, an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP) approved deployment of lending and borrowing protocol Aave V3 on Aptos, which will be the first instance of Aave on a non-EVM blockchain. The initial deployment will support deposits and borrows for APT, USDC, USDT, and sUSDe.

Though total quarterly DEX volume on Aptos declined 46.1% QoQ from $4.1 billion in Q4’24 to $2.2 billion in Q1’25, it then rose 310.3% QoQ to $9.0 billion in Q2’25. This growth was driven almost entirely by Hyperion and ThalaSwap V2. Launched in February, Hyperion’s quarterly volume grew 29x QoQ from $187.7 million to $5.4 billion, more than double Aptos’ total quarterly DEX volume for all protocols in Q2. Similarly, quarterly volume for ThalaSwap V2 grew 4x from $700.1 million in Q1’25 to $2.9 billion in Q2’25.

On a monthly basis, total DEX volume continues to accelerate. Aptos had $4.4 billion in total DEX volume in June ($147.1 million daily average), up 51.7% from $2.9 billion in May ($93.6 million daily average).

Outside of AMM DEX volume, CLOB-based perp DEX volume continued to grow with the launch of new protocols like Kana Labs and Mirage Protocol, alongside longer-standing protocols like Merkle Trade. Merkle Trade has been used by more than 163,000 wallets and, on June 28, surpassed $24 billion in lifetime perps volume.

Amnis Finance continues to dominate APT liquid staking, closing Q2 with 58.7% (34.4 million APT) of liquid staking protocol TVL on Aptos. Upon staking APT, Amnis Finance users receive amAPT on a 1:1 basis. Users can then convert amAPT to stAPT, which earns 100% of stAPT validator rewards and 80% of amAPT’s validator rewards.

On March 26, Amnis Finance launched its governance and reward token AMI. Amnis Finance was the first project to participate in the Aptos Foundation’s Launch and Fundraising Module (LFM), designed to support leading Aptos-native projects preparing for their token generation event (TGE). Other projects in the LFM include Aries Markets, Echelon, and PACT Protocol, as well as Echo Protocol and Hyperion, which completed their respective TGEs in July. Other APT liquid staking providers on Aptos include Thala Labs, TruFin, and Kofi Finance.

Aptos’ stablecoin market cap increased 85.9% in H1 from $648.9 million to $1.2 billion. This was driven almost entirely by market cap increases in Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC following their respective native contract deployments on Oct. 28, 2024, and Jan. 31, 2025. In H1, USDT’s market cap increased more than 81.3% from $455.4 million to $825.5 million while USDC’s market cap increased 148.2% from $117.0 million to $291.4 million.

On top of this, a bridged token contract for Ethena’s USDe, the third-largest stablecoin by market cap, launched on Aptos in late February, making Aptos home to the top three stablecoins by market cap (USDT, USDC, and USDe). Unlike USDT and USDC, which are fiat stablecoins backed by US Dollar and dollar equivalents, USDe is a synthetic dollar stablecoin, backed by crypto assets and corresponding short futures positions. USDe can be staked to receive an equivalent value of sUSDe. sUSDe tokenholders earn yield from USDe’s (1) underlying staked crypto assets and (2) the funding rate of short positions. sUSDe is the reward-bearing version of USDe and increases in value over time as value accrues through the yield USDe’s collateral generates.

As of June 30, 39.4 million in sUSDe has been bridged to Aptos via Stargate, while only 87 USDe exist on Aptos, indicating a strong user preference to earn sUSDe’s yield. Key use cases for both USDe and sUSDe on Aptos include depositing and borrowing from lending protocols such as Echelon, and providing liquidity to stable and non-stable pairs on DEXs like Thala.

Outside of USDT, USDC, and sUSDe/USDe, other notable stablecoins on Aptos include:

• BUIDL (launched in November 2024): BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), 100% backed by U.S. Dollar cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, with daily accrued dividends paid directly to investors’ wallets as new tokens each month. On Dec. 25, the market cap of BUIDL on Aptos increased from roughly $1 million to more than $52 million and sits at $53.8 million as of June 30.
• USDY (launched in July 2024): Ondo’s U.S. Dollar Yield Token (USDY), a tokenized note secured by short-term U.S. Treasuries (~99%) and bank demand deposits (~1%). The token is non-rebasing, as the per-token price increases as yield accrues each day. On April 1, 2025, the token’s market cap decreased from $16.1 million to $7.6 million and sits at $7.5 million as of June 30.
• MOD: Move Dollar (MOD), Thala’s overcollateralized stablecoin that can be minted, and thereby borrowed, by depositing a supported collateral asset in a vault on Thala. In H1, MOD’s market cap declined 85.4% from $8.3 million to $1.2 million.
• USDA: USDA is Auro Finance’s overcollateralized stablecoin. Auro Finance launched on June 25, with users able to deposit supported assets like APT, stAPT, amAPT, stkAPT, USDT, and USDC as collateral to borrow USDA.
• mUSD: mUSD is Mirage Protocol’s overcollateralized stablecoin used as margin on the protocol’s perp DEX. Users can mint mUSD by depositing USDC, APT, or MOVE as collateral. The protocol launched in June.

According to RWA.XYZ, Aptos had $13.2 billion in stablecoin transfer volume in April, $30.4 billion in May, and $48.6.2 billion in June ($5.7 billion adjusted according to Visa’s onchain analytics). Aptos’s June stablecoin transfer volume ranked sixth overall, trailing only Ethereum ($1.11 trillion), BNB Smart Chain ($680.1 billion), TRON ($624.4 billion), Solana ($134.1 billion), and Arbitrum ($56.5 billion).

$419.9 million of the $537.4 million (78.1%) is issued by PACT, a consortium of regulated financial institutions and service providers dedicated to bridging micro-lending origination in emerging markets with capital access in developed markets.

To date, all six products issued by the consortium are via Berkley Square. These include three emerging market portfolios (BSFG-EM-1, BSFG-EM-NPA-1 and 2), a mortgage portfolio (BSFG-CAD-1), a portfolio of credit lines for small and medium enterprises in the UAE (BSFG-AD-1), and a Kenya retail portfolio (BSFG-KES-1).

In February, PACT announced the migration of its onchain credit infrastructure to Aptos, with more than $1 billion being migrated. PACT focuses on emerging markets where traditional banking remains out of reach of 85% of the world’s population and is the first participant in Aptos Foundation’s incubation pilot focused on supporting and scaling high-impact blockchain projects.

Other notable RWAs issued on Aptos include Apollo’s Diversified Credit Securitize Fund (ACRED), Libre Capital’s USD Money Market Fund (UMA) and Brevan Howard Master Fund (BHMA), and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, each token of which represents one share of Franklin Templeton’s onchain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX).

Consumer

Since the network’s inception, consumer applications have been a core focus for Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation. Notable developments in H1 2025 include:

• Gaming: Telegram native battle RPG game Defi Cattos launched in April with full mainnet gameplay released July 22. Players engage in battles to level up characters and earn CATTOS tokens directly in Telegram, without needing to hold APT, as gas transactions are sponsored by the Aptos Foundation. Over 120,000 users participated during the airdrop campaign, while there are more than 10,000 daily users on average. Additionally, Tapos Cat announced in June plans to launch new games this summer. Open beta for Taposverse launched on June 28. Aptos gaming studio Supervillain Labs collaborated with Play3 to promote its game Supervillain Wanted, while Crime&Chase by ntroigames launched in March. Finally, KGeN, which aims to be the home of global gamer data via its proof-of-gamer (PoG) engine, enables gamers to build, own, and monetize their reputation. Holders of Kcash, which is used to reward gamers, continues to grow, with 17.3 million Kcash holders in June 2025, more than 5x the 3.4 million in June 2024.
• NFTs: Top projects by floor price at the end of Q2 include Aptos Monkeys, The Loonies, and Amaterasu. In June, Aptos had roughly $1 million in NFT sales volume on the secondary market. FlipVault, which enables users to barter trade Aptos NFTs, launched in May, while Penguin Chronicles released its content creator platform PingoPond in June.
• Other: Numerous AI agents and launch kits went live, including Alura, Agentlauncher, and Metamove. Joule Finance introduced MetaMove, an initiative to explore AI on Aptos, beginning with a Move AI Agent SDK. Gui Inu released GuiBot, its Telegram trading bot. Also, in March, KaitoAI launched its Aptos leaderboard designed to reward top content creators and community members who actively share and engage with Aptos-related content.

Development and Growth

Many Aptos-based projects announced funding rounds in the first half of 2025, including:

• PlaysOut: PlaysOut, a mini-game platform, raised $7 million in a seed funding round in March and more in an undisclosed strategic round from OKX Ventures Aptos Ecosystem Fund in July.
• Hyperion: Hyperion, the largest DEX by volume on Aptos, closed a strategic funding round led by OKX Ventures in June.
• Amnis Finance: Liquid staking protocol Amnis Finance raised an undisclosed amount in a strategic funding round announced in March.
• Mirage Protocol: Perpetual futures protocol Mirage announced in May that it had raised $1.6 million.
• Universal Health Token: Universal Health Token (UHT), a Singapore-based company developing a proof-of-health protocol, announced in April that it had received an undisclosed strategic investment from the Aptos Foundation.

In February, the Aptos Foundation committed $200 million in grants and investments to expand Aptos DeFi. Following this in March, Movemaker, the Aptos Foundation’s community organization for advancing Aptos in Chinese-speaking regions, launched a $2 million grant program and co-working space for builders in Hong Kong. In June, Movemaker announced $200,000 in seed funding to create the Aptos Move Secure & General Purpose Base Library of smart contract modules in partnership with alcove. On July 31, Aptos Foundation announced a new Payments Grant program, a milestone-based funding program designed to support founders building next-generation payment infrastructure. Grants of up to $150,000 are available, along with hands-on support and ecosystem-wide amplification. To date, the Aptos Foundation has distributed more than 200 grants to ecosystem projects, through its grant programs, which include Ecosystem Grants, Registry Grants (funds contribution to existing pre-approved projects), Gas Station Grants (subsidizes gas fees for user transactions) and Security Credits Grants (covers the costs of security audits up to $25,000).

According to Artemis, Aptos averaged 74 weekly active ecosystem developers in Q2, a 31.7% QoQ decrease from 108 in Q1. As highlighted by Electric Capital’s Developer Report dashboard, Aptos has one of the top developer communities among non-EVM networks. Notable infrastructure and developer-related initiatives in H1 not mentioned elsewhere include:

• Dynamic Script Composer: Aptos Labs introduced its Dynamic Script Composer, adding support to string together multiple concurrent or sequential contract calls as complex multi-call transactions. Logic can be written using its TypeScript SDK to build Aptos transactions without writing Move scripts.
• Account Abstraction: Allows any account to be authenticated via custom authorization rules written in Move code in addition to existing native authentication schemes, as outlined in AIP-104.
• Aptos Connect Upgrades: Aptos Labs introduced a number of upgrades for Aptos Connect, which uses Aptos Keyless Accounts to offer a self-custodial wallet with one-click account creation, no private keys or mnenomics and no wallet applications or extensions required. These upgrades include embedded gas-sponsored asset swaps, additional fiat on-ramps, and keyless backup keys, among others.
• Aptos Build Upgrades: Aptos Labs released new features for its Aptos build developer suite, including no-code indexing, pay as you go billing, and upgrades workspaces.
• X-Chain Accounts: X-chain accounts were introduced, allowing users to access and transact on Aptos using accounts from other chains like Solana or Ethereum via a computed, derivable Aptos address that integrates with Aptos’s account and signature standards.
• Confidential Transactions: Aptos Confidential Transactions (ACTs), which make transaction amounts and balances confidential from the general public, went live on devnet.
• OrderedMaps and BigOrdered Maps: Compared to prior iterations, both of these data structures bring lower costs and latencies associated with building and interacting with high-volume datasets alongside newly introduced Move-native functions. For data sets with more than 10,000 elements, OrderMap provides a more than 100x improvement in latency over its prior iteration SimpleMap.
• Code Loader V2: Code Loader V2 significantly improves the performance of publishing and loading contracts via a redesigned code caching and loading infrastructure.
• Move Mutation Testing: Aptos Labs released a new tool to enhance the quality of unit tests for smart contracts written in Move.
• Aptos Workspace Alpha: Aptos Workspace Alpha, an integrated environment to test Move packages, launched in February.

Closing Summary

Momentum across the Aptos ecosystem continues to advance the vision of a “Global Trading Engine,” supported by DeFi growth, protocol innovations, and new infrastructure, most recently Decibel, a fully onchain trading protocol built on Aptos. On the DeFi front, Aptos’s stablecoin market cap increased 85.9% in the first half of the year to $1.2 billion at Q2 close, driven by market cap increases in USDT and USDC. While Aptos’ DeFi TVL closed H1 effectively flat at $1 billion, it maintained the growth it had in Q4 2024 from its prior TVL range of $300-500 million. Additionally, Aptos closed Q2 with an RWA market cap of $537.4 million, the third largest behind Ethereum and ZKsync Era. Additionally, multiple upgrades were introduced to scale Aptos. Baby Raptr, the first production-stage component of Aptos’s next-generation BFT consensus protocol Raptr, went live in June and improves validator finality latency by 20% (100-150ms). The upcoming Block-STM V2 upgrade will further boost throughput, while Zaptos will reduce end-to-end transaction latency, and Shardines will apply sharding to Aptos’s execution engine.

Though Aptos’s vision to become the “Global Trading Engine” is quite forward-looking, the network’s results have already started to show. Monthly active users (MAU) stayed above 10 million throughout the first half of 2025, maintaining the growth in the second half of 2024 when MAU steadily increased from 2.5 million in July 2024 to 10 million in December 2024. Additionally, the average transaction fee on Aptos decreased 61.1% QoQ to 0.00011 APT ($0.00052) in Q2, roughly 10-100x cheaper than other top Layer-1 blockchains like TRON, Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, and BNB Smart Chain. Finally, in June, co-developers Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto introduced Shelby, a hot storage protocol for data availability designed to deliver Web2-grade low-latency with sub-second reads and high-throughput storage suitable for real-time, read-intensive Web3 applications.

Aptos continues to reach new milestones, release new technologies, and sustain new baselines in usage, turning the Global Trading Engine vision into measurable momentum.

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