Aptos Financial Ecosystem Analysis


From messari by Matt Kreiser

Key Insights

  • In November, Aptos' total value locked (TVL) surpassed $1 billion for the first time and is up 19x year-over-year.
  • BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, expanded its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) to Aptos alongside four other chains in November.
  • In October, USDT, the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, went live with a native token contract on Aptos. Likewise, a native contract for USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, was announced in November.
  • Other innovative financial platforms are being built on Aptos. For example, Propbase, a real estate tokenization marketplace, sold out its first offering in July, while Echo Protocol, which brings Bitcoin liquidity to Aptos, launched in August.
  • Daily DEX volume on Aptos increased by 2,700% (28x) in the last year from $750,000 to $21.5 million.

Primer

Aptos (APT) is a Layer-1 blockchain designed around the core tenets of scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradeability. Aptos was born out of Meta’s Diem and Novi projects, eventually launching in October 2022. Core developer Aptos Labs raised about $400 million in two 2022 private investor rounds.

Aptos’ technological stack features many novel aspects, including the AptosBFTv4 consensus mechanism, the Quorum Store mempool protocol, the Block-STM parallel execution engine, and the programming language Aptos Move. Aptos Move, which builds on the original Move language created by the Diem and Novi teams, offers enhanced flexibility and safety compared to other Web3 programming languages. Aptos Move is being co-developed by multiple protocols.

Other key features aim to improve user experience and safeguards, including accounts where private keys are decoupled from public keys, transaction pre-execution to explain the outcome of a transaction before a user signs it, and transaction expiration time and sequence numbers. Development of the Aptos network and growth of the Aptos ecosystem is primarily led by Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation.

In November, Aptos' total value locked (TVL) surpassed $1 billion for the first time and is up 19x year-over-year. Many key developments have contributed to the expansion and maturation of Aptos’ financial ecosystem amidst this runup. This report will focus on those developments as well as key metrics for Aptos’ financial ecosystem. For a full primer on Aptos, refer to our Initiation of Coverage report.

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Key Metrics