Aptos

Aptos did not inherit Meta's abandoned currency as a legal asset. It inherited people and unfinished engineering questions. Aptos Labs says its founding team worked on Meta's blockchain platform and includes original creators of Move and Block-STM. The 2022 Block-STM paper is even more direct: implementations sat in both the Diem and successor Aptos codebases.

Move treats scarce assets as resources with controlled abilities, while Block-STM guesses that ordered transactions can run together, checks their reads and writes, and re-executes conflicting transactions. The committed state must equal the preset sequential order. That is a precise property, not immunity from faulty access control or a promise that every workload reaches 160,000 transactions per second. Aptos's real inheritance was a method for narrowing failure, not abolishing it.

Mainnet began on 12 October 2022 with one billion APT. The public table assigned 51.02% to Community, 19% to Core Contributors, 16.5% to Foundation and 13.48% to Investors. Labels did not equal immediate public circulation: 410,217,359.767 Community APT were held by Foundation and 100 million by Aptos Labs.

The clocks then diverged. Community and Foundation remainders were anticipated to release 1/120 monthly over ten years. Investors and core contributors had no principal available for twelve months, accelerated releases in months 13 through 18, then 1/48 monthly until the fourth anniversary. Staking rewards were excluded from these principal restrictions. A token could therefore remain locked for distribution and still produce liquid reward supply—a detail hidden by a single 'unlock' chart.

Aptos staking separates an owner, an operator and a voter. The owner controls funds; the operator runs validator infrastructure; the voter signs governance choices and may be delegated. On 4 September 2026, mainnet configuration required 1 million APT to join the active validator set, capped recognized voting power at 50 million APT and renewed a 14-day lock.

Protocol governance uses that active stake. The same snapshot required 1 million APT to propose, 300 million APT for the voting threshold and three days for voting. If a proposal resolves, the governance module can produce signers for framework addresses and execute code with privileges an ordinary holder lacks. This makes voting consequential, while also making delegation and stake concentration consequential. Liquid APT is not automatically a ballot, and a ballot is not ownership of Aptos Labs or Foundation.

AIP-140 arrived in February 2026 with a broad economic turn: lower staking rewards, more fee burning, a 2.1 billion cap, 210 million Foundation APT permanently staked, performance-gated grants and possible buybacks. Its verbs matter. Some items were proposals, some Foundation intentions, and the buyback was exploration. Acceptance of the AIP did not make every line simultaneous protocol state.

Proposal 183 isolated the cap question. It drew 335,184,203.43 APT for and 1,540.54 against and is marked executed on 9 March. Yet the page says code implementation would follow, while its linked source calls itself an empty governance proposal used for voting only. The vote established authorization and direction; the payload did not install a numerical check.

The live resource supplies the ending. CoinInfo still exposed the maximum u128 aggregator bound rather than 2.1 billion, and a view call returned 1,208,193,198.82819350 APT on the review date. A later implementation may close the gap. Until it can be pointed to in framework code and mainnet state, the honest biography has two simultaneous facts: Aptos governance approved a ceiling, and CoinYQ could not verify that the chain yet enforced it.