The Aptos Foundation has committed 210 million APT to permanent staking. Unlocks for early investors and core contributors end this month. Official data shows APT supply is still expanding. A
The Aptos Foundation’s plan to stake 210 million APT permanently is back in focus this week, as the four-year unlock schedule for the network’s early investors and core contributors reaches its end in October 2026. The commitment belongs to a seven-part tokenomics overhaul first published on February 18 under governance proposal AIP-140, which aims to cut emissions, raise fee burns and eventually push APT toward a shrinking supply. That goal has not been met. The network’s own supply dashboard, updated October 8, shows roughly 1.4 million more APT created each month than destroyed.
At the current price the stake is worth close to $168 million. The tokens are not destroyed. They remain staked and keep earning rewards, while the Foundation pledges never to sell or distribute the principal, and it describes the effect as economically similar to a burn because a large potential source of selling disappears.
The Foundation intends to fund its operations from the yield. At a 2.6% reward rate, the stake would produce around 5.46 million APT a year before validator commissions, and those rewards can still reach the market.
The permanent stake is one of seven measures in AIP-140. The proposal also cuts staking rewards from 5.19% to 2.6%, sets a supply ceiling of 2.1 billion APT, raises gas fees tenfold to speed up burns, ties future grants to milestones and opens the door to token buybacks. It also counts on Decibel, a perpetuals exchange built on Aptos and incubated by Aptos Labs, to burn more than 32 million APT a year.
AIP-140 is marked as accepted, but acceptance does not mean every mechanism is live. The supply dashboard already reflects the reward cut and lists 2.1 billion APT as the maximum supply. The tenfold fee increase is not visible in the burn data, buybacks remain exploratory, and the Decibel figure is a forecast tied to trading volume.
APT supply moves on two flows. Validators and delegators receive newly created tokens as staking rewards, and the network destroys the fees users pay for transactions. Supply contracts only when the second flow exceeds the first.
Monthly APT issuance versus burns New staking rewards: 1.5M APT Transaction-fee burns: approx. 0.17M APT Net new supply: +1.4M APT per month Rounded figures based on the official Aptos supply dashboard, October 8, 2026.Aptos has already cut the reward rate roughly in half, but burns remain small. The dashboard reports about 1.9 million APT burned since the October 2022 mainnet launch and an annualized burn rate near 2 million APT. Net issuance of 1.4 million APT a month works out to about 16.8 million a year, so burns would need to grow roughly ninefold to close the gap.
This is where the fee increase and Decibel come in. A tenfold rise in gas fees multiplies the burn per transaction, and the Foundation projects that Decibel could destroy more than 32 million APT annually once it lists more than 100 markets. It is a projection. DeFiLlama data puts Decibel’s cumulative trading volume at about $7.8 billion since its February launch.
Aptos launched with 1 billion APT split between the community, the Foundation, core contributors and investors. With the insider vesting schedule finishing this month, the Foundation expects annualized unlocks to fall by about 60%, and it projects its own grant distributions to drop by more than 50% between 2026 and 2027.
Two separate sources of supply are therefore shrinking: fewer previously locked tokens become sellable, and fewer new tokens are minted. Neither guarantees a higher price, though both remove pressure that has weighed on APT since launch.
APT traded at $0.8024 on Binance at the time of writing on October 9, with a market capitalization of about $702 million. That price sits almost exactly on $0.8029, the first Fibonacci retracement level of the rally from $0.5249 to $0.8888, a move of roughly 69% in ten days during the second half of September. Price has moved sideways below that high for two weeks. The September advance completed a triple bottom on the daily chart, built on three lows between $0.51 and $0.52.
APT/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: Alexander Stefanov on TradingView
On October 8, sellers pushed APT through $0.7498 and the 200-period average at $0.7389, with a low near $0.69. No 4-hour candle closed below the 200 EMA zone. The rebound came on the heaviest volume since the September 18 to 19 breakout and lifted price back above the 20 EMA ($0.7834) and the 50 EMA ($0.7906) in one session, a sequence that usually means buyers absorbed the dip.
Each rally since September 26 has stalled lower: $0.8888, then about $0.86 on October 6, then about $0.85 this morning. The 20 EMA slipped below the 50 EMA around October 7, the first such cross since the rally began, although the gap is narrow enough that a few sessions above $0.80 would reverse it. The MACD line (-0.0029) has moved above its signal line (-0.0092), which shows selling pressure easing, but both readings are below zero and the broader correction has not ended.
APT price levels on the 4-hour chart Resistance: September high$0.8888 Resistance: lower highs$0.85 to $0.86 Current price, on the 0.236 level$0.8024 Support: 20 and 50 EMA$0.78 to $0.79 Support: 200 EMA and 0.382 level$0.74 to $0.75 Invalidation: 4-hour close below, exposes $0.6639$0.69A 4-hour close above $0.8029 that holds would bring $0.85 to $0.86 back into range, and beyond the $0.8888 high the next Fibonacci extension sits near $0.988. Failure sends price back to $0.78 to $0.79. Below that comes a second test of the 200 EMA, and second tests of a level that was just pierced tend to hold less reliably than the first.
The Foundation’s published materials establish the commitment to stake 210 million APT permanently. They do not show that the tokens already sit under an enforceable lock, and the Foundation has not published an address or contract that would let outside observers confirm it. The monthly dashboard update is the other figure to track, because it will show whether burns begin to narrow the gap with staking emissions.
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