Aptos overhauls tokenomics with 10x gas fees, halved staking rewards, and a 2.1B APT hard cap

Aptos just rewrote its economic playbook. The Layer-1 blockchain approved proposal AIP-140, a sweeping tokenomics overhaul that introduces a hard supply cap of 2.1 billion APT, slashes annual staking rewards nearly in half, and cranks gas fees up by a factor of ten. Every single one of those higher fees gets permanently burned. What changed, and by how much The centerpiece is the 2.1 billion APT hard cap. Before AIP-140, there was no ceiling on how many tokens could ever exist. Now there is, and lifting it would require a fresh round of community governance. At the time the proposal went through, circulating supply sat at roughly 1.196 billion APT, leaving about 904 million APT of headroom for future growth. Annual staking rewards dropped from 5.19% to 2.6%. Transaction costs on Aptos are now ten times higher than they were before the proposal. The critical detail is what happens to those fees: 100% of collected gas gets permanently burned, removing tokens from circulation forever. The burn math As of mid-September 2026, the network had burned roughly 1.8 million APT cumulatively since its mainnet launch in October 2022. The 10x fee increase is designed to accelerate that number su...