The Aptos Foundation announced that 210 million APT will be locked and permanently sent to staking. These tokens will never be sold or distributed, and the foundation’s operations will be funded by rewards for staking them. This represents nearly 18% of the current circulating supply and about 37% of the tokens the foundation held at launch.
The lock-up is part of a tokenomics update plan that the foundation published on February 18. Other key points include reducing the annual staking yield from 5.19% to 2.6%, increasing gas fees by a factor of 10, and introducing a hard cap on the supply at 2.1 billion APT. Currently, about 1.2 billion tokens are in circulation. All network fees are burned, so an increase in gas fees will boost the volume of tokens burned, while transferring a stablecoin will still cost around $0.00014.
In addition, the foundation is considering a program to buy back APT using its own funds and revenues. The goal of all these changes is to ensure that token burning exceeds token issuance.
