Aptos updates its token economic model: Gas fees increase tenfold, supply capped at 2.1 billion tokens.

PANews reported on February 19th that Aptos announced an update to its APT token economic model, shifting to a performance-driven token supply mechanism that links APT supply to actual network usage. Specifically, the update includes the following seven key changes:

1. Reduce staking rewards and incentivize long-term stakers. The Aptos Foundation has proposed reducing the annualized staking reward rate from 5.19% to 2.6%. Furthermore, the Aptos Foundation is exploring a governance proposal to change the staking framework to better align incentives with long-term network participation.

2. Increase Gas Fees by 10x. Aptos is currently one of the lowest-cost blockchains, and given how low transaction fees are, the Aptos Foundation proposes through governance to increase Gas Fees to 10 times the current amount. Even after the increase, stablecoin transfer fees on the network will still be as low as approximately $0.00014.

3. Transaction Utilization and Fees. A new deflationary mechanism is introduced through Decibel, a decentralized exchange protocol on the Aptos chain, which will enable high-frequency trading activities to consume and destroy APT on a large scale.

4. The hard supply cap is fixed at 2.1 billion APT. Once approved by the community, no new tokens can be minted beyond this cap.

5. The Foundation permanently locks 210 million APT. The Aptos Foundation will ensure that 210 million APT are locked and permanently staked in the network. These tokens will never be sold or distributed and will be permanently locked.

6. Performance-linked grant issuance. The Aptos Foundation will primarily focus on providing future grants and rewards, which will only be cashed out upon achieving key milestones related to Aptos' role as a "global trading engine."

7. Launch a programmatic buyback program. The Aptos Foundation has committed to exploring a protocol buyback program or reserve that will programmatically buy back APT on the open market based on market opportunities.