While the price of the APT token has taken a hit over the past year, the Aptos blockchain has experienced a remarkable surge in activity that paints a very different picture beneath the surface. In March, the network’s total value locked (TVL) reached $1.03 billion, more than doubling year-over-year. This growth is especially striking considering the 47% drop in APT’s market price over the same period.
According to recent data shared by Messari, Aptos had previously fluctuated between $300 million and $500 million in TVL from late March to mid-September 2024. Since then, the ecosystem has gained steady momentum, pushing its TVL past the $1 billion threshold for the first time in November and maintaining that level into March 2025. Compared to last year, this marks a 109% increase in USD terms and an extraordinary 562% in APT terms, highlighting the underlying expansion of the network’s utility and user engagement.
Stablecoins have played a pivotal role in this growth. The market cap of stablecoins on Aptos surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, representing a tenfold increase from the same time last year and a threefold growth since December. This explosive rise was primarily driven by inflows into USDT and USDC, following the deployment of their native contracts on the network. USDT’s market cap on Aptos grew more than eight times to $680 million, while USDC nearly doubled from $128 million to $295 million. These figures reflect a deepening trust in Aptos as a viable Layer 1 platform for stablecoin operations.
To support its growing ecosystem and meet performance demands, Aptos Labs has rolled out two new technologies: Zaptos and Shardines. Zaptos enhances the network’s pipelined architecture, allowing different stages of block production to occur simultaneously, which significantly reduces latency. This innovation helps the network maintain high efficiency and responsiveness even under heavy load. Meanwhile, Shardines introduces horizontal scaling through transaction sharding, enabling multiple nodes to process segments of transactions in parallel. Together, these advancements are part of Aptos’ broader vision to become a global transaction hub capable of handling up to one million transactions per second.
As of early April, Aptos ranks as the 11th largest blockchain by total value locked, based on data from DefiLlama. Institutional interest in Aptos is also beginning to take shape. Last month, Bitwise submitted a proposal to launch a spot Aptos ETF in the U.S., with Coinbase Custody listed as the intended custodian. Notably, the ETF filing excludes any staking component, despite Aptos being a proof-of-stake network.
This isn’t Bitwise’s first foray into Aptos-related financial products. In November, it launched an Aptos Staking ETP on Switzerland’s SIX Swiss Exchange. That move was followed by a Spanish bank allocating 2% of its holdings to the asset—an early sign that institutional exposure to Aptos may be gaining traction.
Even as its native token battles price volatility, Aptos is showing signs of durable ecosystem growth and deeper integration into DeFi and traditional finance alike. The network’s rapid rise in stablecoin volume, technical enhancements, and emerging institutional interest suggest that the Aptos story is far from over.
By Alejandro Silva Ramírez, Crypto Analyst & Columnist