Aptos Net Supply Growth Falls to 1.5% After March Changes

Aptos (APT) is adding tokens at an estimated annualized net rate of about 1.5%, down from roughly 5% before March 2026 changes that reduced issuance and increased fee burns.

The staking reward rate fell to 2.6% from 5.19%, reducing the pace of new APT issuance. The gas fee schedule rose 10-fold, increasing the amount of APT burned through transactions. The changes also set a 2.1 billion APT supply cap and permanently locked 210 million APT.

Lower staking rewards and higher burns affect supply in different ways. Staking rewards create new tokens; gas fee burns remove tokens. The net growth rate reflects the balance between them.

Burns remain below new issuance. They now offset about 10% of newly issued APT, compared with 0.2% before the changes. Over a recent 30-day period, Aptos burned 174,195 APT while staking rewards added about 1.5 million APT.

At the current mix and sizes of transactions, fee burns would match issuance at an estimated 91 million transactions a day, roughly 10 times current activity. That would bring net supply growth to zero. Supply would contract only if burns exceeded issuance. Both the transaction estimate and the roughly 10-fold increase depend on the current mix and sizes remaining the same.

A separate change is approaching for token unlocks. Investor and team vesting is scheduled to end in October 2026. Unlocks are expected to total about 135 million APT in 2026, then fall to about 21 million APT a year after that vesting ends. The figures exclude tokens newly issued through staking.

Unlocks release tokens under an existing schedule, while staking rewards create new APT. The expected decline in unlocks therefore does not change the estimate that fee burns remain below new issuance.