Aptos (APT) Vesting Ends October 12, Cutting Monthly Releases 60% to 4.54M

Aptos (APT) will close its four-year vesting schedule for early backers and core contributors on Monday, October 12, trimming planned monthly token releases by roughly 60%, from 11.31 million APT to 4.54 million. A vesting schedule is the timetable under which a project releases locked tokens to its early investors and contributors. Both groups drew down under identical terms, with nothing discretionary about the endpoint. The last monthly tranche for both groups went out on September 12, 2026, and the Aptos Foundation marks the cycle's formal end at the fourth anniversary of the network's October 2022 mainnet launch. The Aptos (APT) price slipped 3.6% over the past 24 hours, per our live spot monitoring, as the final cliff approached. The genesis allocation gave core contributors 190 million APT and early backers 134.78 million, 324.78 million tokens in all, equal to 32.48% of the 1 billion APT the mainnet minted at launch. Each grant carried a 12-month cliff and then vested monthly through month 48. The two groups drew 6.77 million Aptos (APT) from each 11.31 million monthly release, about six of every ten tokens unlocked in a typical month. After October 12, only the 4.54 million APT flowing to the Community and Foundation pools remains. No other holder class stays on the schedule after the cutoff. That stream disburses one 120th of its remaining balance each month and is scheduled to run until 2032, keeping the drip on a declining curve rather than a fixed payout. Measured yearly, planned releases fall from around 135.7 million APT to 54.5 million. The Foundation had already sketched the same 60% reduction in its February 18 tokenomics update, adding that grant distributions will drop by more than 50% between 2026 and 2027.

The reduction leaves 331.69 million APT of genesis supply still in vesting, all of it in the Community and Foundation pools. Circulating supply was 871.02 million on September 30, with total supply near 1.2 billion, per on-chain records. With the investor and contributor allocations exhausted, staking becomes the primary source of new Aptos (APT). Staking yields have come down from 5.19% to 2.6% a year, and about 763 million APT, 63% of all tokens, is locked with validators under the network's proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. That stake mints roughly 19.8 million APT annually, while unstaking takes as long as 14 days. Transaction fees are burned in full; from launch through mid-September 2026 the network has burned around 1.9 million APT. The same Aptos tokenomics overhaul raised gas fees tenfold, although the Foundation says a stablecoin transfer still costs about $0.00014. A hard cap of 2.1 billion APT governs issuance, approved by token holders rather than left open-ended. Mainnet minted 1 billion APT, and staking added another 196 million by February, leaving 904 million of headroom under the ceiling. Proposal #183 set the cap onchain, passing with 335.2 million APT in favor and roughly 1,500 against. The Foundation has also committed to locking and permanently staking 210 million APT, about 37% of its mainnet holdings, and says the rewards on that stake fund its operations while the tokens are never sold or distributed. The network also carries roughly $723 million in real-world assets, and Franklin Templeton and BlackRock both operate tokenized funds on it. On January 14, the US exchange Bitnomial launched the first regulated APT futures. Protocol work continues in parallel: one proposal targets 55x faster withdrawals in internal testing, and another covers an encrypted mempool design with a 27ms latency cost.

The October 12 close removes the largest scheduled seller from APT's supply table. The two cohorts that drew 6.77 million APT a month exit the schedule entirely, leaving a 4.54 million monthly drip into the 2030s while staking adds about 19.8 million a year. Combined scheduled and staking issuance now runs far below the 135.7 million APT the network was releasing annually through this month. Unlock calendars tend to be priced in advance, with spot trading flows often front-running the date; altcoin supply overhangs of this size are no exception, and our APT technical analysis tracks the levels around October 12 separately. What is fixed is the calendar: the final cliff lands October 12, the 2.1 billion cap stands onchain, and the first release under the smaller schedule follows within days.