The numbers are hard to ignore. Aptos processed 2.95 billion transactions between April 2025 and May 2026, a 532% year-over-year jump documented in the Aptos Annual Report published by Token Relations.
That figure puts Aptos in a different conversation from where it sat twelve months ago.
The Stablecoin Numbers Nobody Fully Reported
The network’s stablecoin market cap grew 91% over the period, hitting an all-time high of $1.95 billion. Monthly stablecoin volume peaked at $68.13 billion in July 2025, according to the Token Relations report, which covered the full twelve-month window across network performance, governance, and institutional activity.
Real-world asset value on the network rose 58.5% to $869.9M. Products now live on Aptos include BlackRock’s BUIDL, Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX, and Ondo’s USDY.
That RWA growth did not happen through a single product or partnership. It came from multiple institutions deploying tokenized assets onto the same infrastructure, at the same time.
Block Times, Fees, and What the Governance Actually Changed
On the infrastructure side, block times dropped below 50ms and then again to under 25ms during the reporting period. Archon, the next consensus upgrade, is built to push that figure toward 10ms, a threshold that would bring Aptos latency closer to centralized exchange matching engines.
Three governance proposals passed that will change how APT supply and fees work permanently. As Aptos posted on X, the changes include a 2.1 billion APT hard supply cap, staking rewards cut from 5.19% to roughly 2.6%, and a 10x gas fee increase with all fees burned going forward. The Aptos Foundation will lock 210 million APT permanently, close to 18% of circulating supply at the time of the announcement.
“Twelve months of building the full stack for markets and machines. One report.” the Aptos account posted on X, referring to the Token Relations publication covering April 2025 through May 2026.
Those are structural changes, not roadmap commitments. They are already passed.
Where Yellow Card and Coins.ph Come In
Most coverage of this report stopped at the institutional and tokenomics numbers. What it skipped is where the actual user base came from.
Yellow Card, the Africa-focused crypto payment platform, connected African users directly to Aptos during the period. Coins.ph brought Southeast Asian access. Bitso served Latin America. Tria, another onboarding platform, also went live in this window.
For a Kenyan trader or a user in Lagos trying to move value across borders using stablecoins, the question was never just “which Layer-1 is fastest.” It was “which one do my apps support.” Yellow Card’s integration into Aptos answers that question differently than it did twelve months ago.
Shelby, an AI-native product from Aptos, launched in early access during the same period. Decibel Trade went live in February.
What the $50M Commitment Covers
Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs announced a combined commitment of over $50 million targeting what the report describes as the “full stack for markets and machines.” The allocation covers first-party product development, protocol infrastructure research, and a strategic fund specifically for trading and AI partners.
Confidential APT, which allows private on-chain transfers, launched to mainnet. An encrypted mempool, which would hide transaction contents before block inclusion, is still pending governance approval as of the report’s publication.
The report covers 12 months of data compiled by Token Relations, an independent research firm. The full document is available at token-relations.com.
Whether the governance changes and infrastructure commitments translate into sustained user growth beyond the current platforms depends on whether stablecoin volume holds at these levels, according to on-chain data tracked through the reporting period. Monthly volume fell from its July 2025 peak of $68.13 billion in subsequent months even as the market cap figure climbed.
