Aptos's APT gained between 38% and 51% over four weeks, beating Bitcoin and Ether, as a four-year unlock ended and a $50 million commitment landed.
APT$0.839861+1.49%
BTC$83,312.00+0.51%Aptos's APT token gained 51% over four weeks, outpacing both Bitcoin and Ether. Trackers do not fully agree on the size of that run. Other four-week measurements for the period ending October 13, 2026 put the gain at 38.5% to 44%.
The token changed hands around $0.85 on October 13 and $0.88 a day earlier, with a market cap of $738.55 million and 882.9 million APT in circulation. Its weekly return is nearly flat, which suggests most of the heavy lifting happened earlier in the month.
Three events landed inside that window: the end of a four-year unlock schedule, more than $50 million in new commitments, and a privacy feature that finally shipped.
October 12, 2026 completed Aptos's four-year token unlock schedule for early contributors and investors. With it finished, monthly emissions dropped by around 60%, from approximately 11.3 million APT to roughly 4.5 million.
The last big cliff came on October 11 at 20:00 UTC: 11.31 million APT, worth about $9.5 million. APT's 24-hour spot volume at that point was around $130.27 million, so the release was worth roughly 7.29% of a single day's trading.
The original distribution explains why the calendar mattered. It set aside 190 million APT for core contributors and about 134.78 million for early investors, together 32.48% of the 1 billion tokens created at mainnet launch. That is the supply the four-year schedule released over time, and the schedule is now done.
Around October 9, Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation announced more than $50 million in commitments aimed at on-chain trading infrastructure and AI-related projects. The foundation said the money would also fund integrations with neobanks, institutional platforms and wallet providers, and go toward encrypted mempools and confidential perpetuals trading.
Two products it covers are already live. Decibel is an AI-powered on-chain order book and perpetuals exchange that launched on Aptos mainnet in February. Shelby is a decentralized storage protocol for AI agent workloads.
Aptos activated an optional encrypted mempool on mainnet that same week, with Keyless Accounts and Confidential APT live by October 13.
The mechanism takes two sentences. When you opt in, a compatible wallet encrypts the transaction's contents on your device before it is sent. Assets and amounts stay hidden until block ordering is final, while the sender's address and the gas fee remain visible. The network still knows who is paying and what the transaction costs. It cannot see what the transaction does in time to reorder it for profit.
The tradeoffs are published. Encrypted transactions carry a minimum gas price at twice the network's base minimum. In tests involving 50 nodes, the encryption added about 20 milliseconds per block compared with the existing consensus implementation. The code also went through independent security reviews by ZKSecurity.
It is aimed at institutions submitting large transactions, traders who want to avoid MEV risk, AI agents and builders. MEV, or maximal extractable value, is the profit bots can take from pending transactions they can see and reorder.
Price is one measure of a chain, and the others look less flattering right now. DefiLlama's tracked stablecoin market cap on Aptos has fallen 17.5% over four weeks, landing at about $910 million.
The same page shows USDT on Aptos at $431.66 million, down 24.51% over 30 days, and USDC at $301.2 million, down 13.66% over the same period. Those balances are what sits on the chain to trade with, and they are shrinking while the token rises.
Decibel is the largest protocol on Aptos by total value locked, at $29.56 million, with $22,742 in fees and revenue over 24 hours. Echelon Market, a lending protocol, holds $6.64 million of TVL and collected $728,028 in fees in the same window. Hyperion, a DEX, saw its TVL fall 25.99% over seven days and 30.21% over 30 days.
APT fell from about $0.92 to $0.85 inside a 24-hour window, a decline of roughly 8% that accelerated after the unlock. The total crypto market cap slipped about 0.5% and the altcoin market cap around 1.2% over the same period, which makes the move specific to Aptos rather than the market. Falling on the day a chain ships three features is the pattern traders call selling the news.
The Aptos Foundation moved to take supply off the table instead. On October 8 it reaffirmed a pledge to permanently lock and stake 210 million APT, roughly 18% of circulating supply when the plan was announced in February, saying it will never sell the principal and will fund operations from staking rewards. Outside observers still cannot confirm it: the foundation has not published an address or contract showing the tokens are locked.
The next cliff unlock is set for November 11, 2026, releasing 4.54 million APT worth about $3.8 million from Community and Foundation allocations. That is roughly a quarter of October's release, and it matches the lower emissions after the schedule closed.
Also pending is a governance proposal for a new execution engine called MonoMove, aimed at improving smart contract performance by up to 55 times. It is a proposal rather than a shipped product, and the multiple comes from Aptos's own internal tests.
The foundation projects Decibel could burn more than 32 million APT a year. That figure is a forecast, not a measurement.
Whether the demand side of this story shows up is testable. Stablecoin balances on Aptos, the fees Decibel and Echelon actually collect, and the size of the November release are all public, and all of them say more about where APT goes from here than the last four-week percentage does.
ENS's ENSv2 plan would move new .eth registrations to v2 while letting holders stay on v1. Migrating a name, though, is a one-way trip.
Hester Peirce's exit left the SEC with two commissioners and the CFTC with one. Seven of ten seats are vacant and no nominees had been announced as of Oct. 13.
A single Bitcoin address spent 4,581.93824000 BTC on Oct.
BTC
