Aptos TVL Doubles Year-Over-Year Despite APT Token Price Drop

Aptos has shown consistent growth, closing March with a total value locked (TVL) of $1.03 billion, after first crossing the $1 billion mark in November.

According to Messari’s latest report, the figure reflects a strong climb from its earlier TVL range of $300-500 million seen between late March and mid-September 2024. Compared to the previous year, Aptos’ TVL rose by 109% in USD terms and a whopping 562% in APT terms. This increase occurred despite a 47% drop in the APT token price over the year.

USDT, USDC Drive Aptos Stablecoin Market Cap

The stablecoin market cap on the Layer 1 network reached a milestone on March 24 when it surpassed $1 billion for the first time, which marked an over 10x increase compared to the same time last year and triple the value from December.

This rapid growth has been fueled by major inflows into Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC after the launch of their native contracts on October 28 and January 31, respectively. While USDT saw its market cap soar over 8x to $680 million, USDC increased by 131% after climbing from $128 million to $295 million.

Aptos Labs has launched two major technologies – Zaptos and Shardines – to improve performance. These solutions aim to lower latency and increase throughput as Aptos works toward becoming a global transaction hub capable of processing 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

Zaptos is designed to improve Aptos’ pipelined architecture, where multiple block stages run in parallel for better efficiency. By optimizing this system, it sharply cuts end-to-end latency, thereby boosting overall performance and helping Aptos achieve faster, more scalable blockchain operations.

Shardines, on the other hand, brings a horizontally scaled execution engine by splitting transactions into smaller parts and distributing them across multiple nodes for parallel processing. This sysytem enables the network to manage more transactions at once, and significantly increase transaction speed and overall network efficiency.

Aptos is currently positioned as the 11th largest total value locked among blockchains, according to data compiled by DefiLlama.

Institutional Demand For APT

Bitwise filed to introduce a spot Aptos ETF in the United States last month. Although the network operates on a proof-of-stake model, the filing notably excluded any staking component. Additionally, Coinbase Custody is designated as the ETF’s proposed custodian in the application.

The asset manager had launched an Aptos Staking ETP on Switzerland’s SIX Swiss Exchange last November, following which a Spanish bank then allocated 2% of its holdings to it.