Aptos (APT) has activated a feature that lets its biggest stakers push transactions with up to 100 times the network's normal processing limits, giving large APT holders a genuine new reason
Aptos (APT) has activated a feature that lets its biggest stakers push transactions with up to 100 times the network's normal processing limits, giving large APT holders a genuine new reason to stake beyond simply earning yield.
Aptos is a layer-1 blockchain network built for high transaction throughput and low fees, designed to support everything from decentralized finance (DeFi) trading to real-world asset (RWA) tokenization on a single network.
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Every transaction on Aptos has run under the same processing limits, regardless of how complex the underlying task is. That works fine for simple transfers and swaps, but it creates a ceiling for heavier workloads, like liquidations on decentralized exchanges, large-scale data migrations, or emergency actions that need more computing power in a single transaction.
Teams that hit that ceiling have had to either break the work into smaller pieces or move parts of it off the blockchain entirely.
The feature, known as AIP-146 and authored by George Mitenkov of Aptos Labs, gives transactions an opt-in way around the standard limit. A transaction can request higher processing power, scaling from just above the standard rate up to a hard cap of 100 times normal. To qualify, the party paying for the transaction has to prove they control a substantial amount of staked APT.
Every blockchain needs transaction limits to protect the network (gas, compute units). But not every legitimate transaction fits into the same box: a coin transfer and a liquidation are very different workloads. Still, limits are universally applied to all transactions making…
— George Mitenkov (@GeorgeMitenkov) July 1, 2026
This is the part that defines who the feature is really for, because the thresholds are steep. Under the tiers proposed with the AIP, unlocking a 2x multiplier on execution requires roughly 1 million APT in committed stake; 4x requires about 5 million APT; and 8x requires around 10 million APT. The limits governing data reads and writes carry even higher thresholds, starting at about 5 million APT for the first tier. The exact tiers are set by on-chain governance and can be adjusted over time.
At those levels, this is not a retail feature. As the proposal itself acknowledges, the large stakers who qualify are overwhelmingly exchanges, custodians and validators, the players with millions of dollars of APT already committed to the network. Smaller participants cannot reach the higher multipliers, which is by design: the whole point is to tie elevated power to a large, verifiable economic stake.
A fee payer can prove that stake in three ways: by owning a stake pool directly, by being the designated voter for one, or by being a delegator in a delegation pool.
Liquidations are a clear example of where this matters. When a liquidation transaction fails because it hits the standard processing limit, bad debt on the platform continues to grow and users end up absorbing larger losses. By allowing qualifying transactions to request higher limits, protocols get more reliable execution for exactly the kind of heavy transactions that keep onchain markets functioning during periods of stress.
For large holders of APT, this creates a genuine functional reason to stake beyond collecting yield, tying the token's usefulness more directly to real network activity.
Aptos is clear that the feature is experimental. The proposal states that the mechanism may be "modified, restricted, or removed at any time" if it introduces risks to performance, security or fairness, and it explicitly warns that developers "should not build systems that critically depend on guaranteed access to higher transaction limits."
In other words, the capability is real and live, but Aptos has reserved the right to change the rules, the thresholds, or the feature itself as it watches how the network uses it.
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