APT Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

Aptos (APT) supply grew about 4.40% in the last 90 days and is on track to grow about 2.85% in the next 90. Monthly vesting unlocks did most of it: 33.93M APT left the locked calendar, and staking pay minted another 4.83M APT. The gas fee burn took out a net 407K APT, so it offset about 1% of what came in. The team and investor vesting ends with a final unlock on Oct 12 2026, after which the monthly unlock falls from 11.31M to 4.54M APT, and Aptos now has a hard cap of 2.1 billion APT.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the 90 days to Oct 5 2026, Aptos added 38.76M APT to its tradable supply and removed 0.41M APT, a net rise of +4.40% on a circulating supply of 871.26M APT. Our supply monitor, which tracks the market-wide circulating figure day by day, reads +4.67% over its own 90-day window. The gap is 0.27 percentage points, inside our 0.5-point tolerance, so no warning flag is shown and no deeper hunt was needed. The next 90 days project to +2.85%, lower only because two of the three coming unlocks are the smaller post-vesting size. In one line: Aptos is an unlock-driven, inflationary token whose gas burn is still far too small to matter.

Sell pressure: where new APT comes from

The largest source is vesting. Aptos launched on Oct 12 2022 with 1 billion APT, and most of it was locked on a calendar that releases coins on the 12th of every month. Until October 2026 each release is 11.31M APT: 3.96M to core contributors, 2.81M to investors, 3.21M to the community pool and 1.33M to the Aptos Foundation. Three releases fell inside our window (Jul 12, Aug 12 and Sep 12 2026), so the vesting unlocks row reads 33.93M APT. Each one enters the circulating count on its date, whoever receives it.

The second source is protocol inflation: staking pay. Aptos mints new APT for stakers at the end of every two-hour epoch. A governance vote in March 2026 cut the yearly rate from 5.19% to 2.6%, and the chain shows the rate is already at its floor, so it cannot step down further on its own. We read the actual payout on 40 epochs spread across the window and found about 4,461 APT per epoch. Over 1,083 epochs that is 4.83M APT of protocol inflation. About 755M APT is staked today, slightly less than a month ago, which is why the payout per epoch is drifting down.

The Foundation and unscheduled unlocks row is 0. Everything still locked sits on the published calendar, and the calendar matches the locked supply to within about 10,000 APT, so there is no hidden pile that could be released off schedule. The long-term locked or bankruptcy row is also 0: no estate, trustee or court process holds APT.

Buy pressure: where new APT goes

Aptos has one working buy-side mechanism: the protocol fee burn. Every gas fee on Aptos is paid in APT and destroyed, and a March 2026 vote raised all gas costs tenfold to make that burn matter. In our window about 487K APT was burned, but roughly 80K APT of it was handed back to validators as priority fees at each epoch change. That leaves a net burn of 407K APT, about 4,520 APT a day. Activity cooled through the window, from about 11M user transactions a day in July to about 9M in September, so the burn did not grow even with the higher fees.

The programmatic buyback row is 0. In February 2026 the Aptos Foundation said it would explore buying APT on the open market with cash or revenue, but no program, wallet or purchase has appeared. The Foundation buy row is 0 for the same reason. The new long-term lock row is also 0: the Foundation pledged to keep 210M APT staked forever, and about 755M APT is staked in total, but staked APT still counts as circulating, so these locks take nothing out of the float. They only make the staking payout larger.

Foundation and overhang

Aptos publishes no wallet addresses for its locked buckets, so we track them by the calendar and check that the calendar adds up. Today about 234M APT of community pool and 97M APT of Foundation pool are still locked, each released monthly until October 2032, plus the final 6.77M APT team and investor tranche due on Oct 12 2026. Together they explain the gap between total supply (1.21 billion APT) and circulating supply (871.26M APT) almost exactly. The Foundation's 210M APT permanent stake is a promise, not a separate locked bucket, and no buyback wallet exists yet. We re-check the calendar and the total supply at every refresh; if the locked supply falls faster than the calendar says, the extra outflow enters the Foundation and unscheduled unlocks row at the next refresh.

How APT compares to other high-throughput Layer 1s

Aptos sits between two familiar designs. Like Solana, it pays stakers in newly minted coins and burns part of its fees; unlike Solana, whose yearly inflation steps down on a fixed curve, Aptos cut its rate by governance vote and now holds it flat at 2.6% a year until the 2.1 billion APT cap comes into view. Like Sui, Aptos came out of the same Meta research lineage and launched with a large locked allocation that unlocks month by month; unlike Sui, which minted its whole 10 billion supply at the start and pays stakers from a pre-minted pool, Aptos mints staking pay as it goes, so its total supply keeps rising.

Compared with Ethereum, the burn tells the story. Ethereum also mints for stakers and burns fees, and its burn offsets a real slice of issuance in busy weeks. On Aptos the burn offset about 1% of all new supply in our window, even after the tenfold fee rise, because transaction fees are still tiny per transaction. The deciding number for APT is not staking pay or the burn but the vesting calendar: unlocks were about seven times the staking mint this window.

That balance is about to shift. After Oct 12 2026 the team and investor vesting is done, and monthly unlocks drop by 60% to 4.54M APT. Unlocks will still be about three times the monthly staking pay, and a much larger burn, from busier trading apps or a further fee rise, would be needed before Aptos could stop growing its supply.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Oct 12 2026: the final team and investor unlock, 11.31M APT in total including the monthly community and Foundation share. It is the last release of that size.

Nov 12 2026 and Dec 12 2026: the first two smaller monthly unlocks, 4.54M APT each, all to the community and Foundation pools.

Staking changes: the Foundation has said it is designing a staking framework that pays more for longer lock-ups within the same total budget; a governance vote on it would change how the 2.6% is shared, not how much is minted.

Buyback news: any start of the buyback the Foundation said it would explore. A live program would open the buyback row for the first time.

Burn pace: transactions per day and gas burned, which slid from July to September. Only a sharp rise would move the buy side.

Summary

Aptos (APT) is inflationary: supply grew about 4.40% in the last 90 days and is projected to grow about 2.85% in the next 90. The main driver is the monthly vesting calendar (33.93M APT this window), with 4.83M APT of staking pay at a flat 2.6% yearly rate, against a net gas burn of only 407K APT. The key risk is that unlocks keep coming every month until 2032, even after the final team and investor tranche on Oct 12 2026. The ceiling is the 2.1 billion APT hard cap, still far above today's 1.21 billion total supply.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of APT, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 5 2026.