Aptos is bringing the world’s economy on-chain
At Aptos Labs, we're convinced of one fundamental truth: the world will move on-chain, transforming how every form of value transfer occurs. Traditional currencies, digital assets, data, and resources will travel on blockchain rails, creating a more accessible and efficient global economic system.
This change is necessary because the current systems and infrastructure powering the world’s economies today simply cannot meet the demands of next-generation finance. There’s a massive technology gap that’s only getting bigger. The lack of value transfer efficiency is like trying to stream Netflix on a flip phone.
Today, capital markets remain out of reach for most of the global population. The complexity, inefficiencies, and geographic limitations of traditional finance prevent billions of people from accessing the assets and opportunities that open markets provide.
The promise of crypto has always been to remove barriers between geographies, institutions, and people — and provide the tools they need to thrive financially. No blockchain has yet truly delivered on this promise at a global scale.
With a true global trading engine, we envision a world where:
All assets—stocks, treasuries, real estate, and more—are tokenized and tradable on-chain
Capital markets operate 24/7, without borders or intermediaries
Anyone, anywhere, can participate in trading and capital formation—instantly and securely
We’re not as far off as you might think. Since its inception, Aptos has been designed and systematically built to have the core building blocks that enable developers and institutions to create applications to power this transformation.
So, what have we done so far?
Aptos is one of the few blockchains to support the top 3 major stablecoins by market cap (USDT, USDC, and USDe), reaching a $1B+ market cap in a few months. In fact, on a percentage basis, USDT on Aptos has grown faster than any other chain since the beginning of 2025.
The Aptos Foundation has committed $200M in new grants and investments focused on ecosystem growth, supporting innovative and world-class builders building on the global trading engine.
Plus, the inclusion of Aptos in Bitwise's Exchange-Traded Product (ETP) has translated to greater institutional visibility and quicker mainstream adoption.
Aptos researchers have proposed next-generation technology improvements like Shardines, which tackles the notorious bottleneck of blockchain execution and moves us closer to infinite scalability.
The network is in the process of integrating Raptr, which was engineered to maintain sub-second latency and high throughput in any condition.
Each of these achievements is individually industry-leading in its own category, but when you zoom out, the greater vision comes into focus. These upgrades build upon a decentralized platform that is already leading in scalability, cost, and latency — Aptos offers the fastest typical user latency on the planet at ~650ms or so. With the lowest stablecoin transaction fees at less than one hundredth of a cent.
All this underscores one simple truth: Money moves better on Aptos. Period.
There are so many novel products and improvement proposals in the pipeline being developed toward this vision. While each one will require a dedicated post to explain and unpack, I’ll do my best to provide a quick overview now, broken down into three core buckets: Trading Primitives, Performance Upgrades, and the User and Developer Experience.
Trading Primitives
Here’s what Aptos developers are building to ensure that the network is fully optimized for trading, payments, and money movement:
Framework-level Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) - A new open-source CLOB is already proceeding through the AIP process. If approved and adopted, the new CLOB will be a powerful engine driving growth in Aptos DeFi, allowing any team looking to build an exchange to accelerate DeFi application development. In true Aptos spirit, the order book will embody industry-leading high throughput and performance, ensuring that TPS (transactions/sec) and MPS (matches/sec) are never bottlenecked, even for a single market. The Order Book will be built with ecosystem-first principles in a fully composable way, unlocking a suite of new decentralized finance innovations across any financial instrument - e.g., RWAs, options, perps, and more. For maximum transparency, all operations - order placement, cancellation, and matching are 100% on-chain. On-chain implementation and matching result in wealth creation for traders because fairness is guaranteed by the system, not by the entity finding the matches. With on-chain matching, anyone can transparently verify that market makers aren’t contracted to a third party to provide preferential order flow treatment.
Reordered Transactions - Aptos is a system with permissionless validators where transaction sequencing is determined largely by priority fees. Most of the time, this system performs as intended, but with respect to trading platforms built on the blockchain, this system can impact trade execution. Absent intervention, makers are forced to price trades with a wider spread to defend against losses that result from market movements paired with an inability to guarantee execution of certain types of orders. That is why a new AIP is being introduced to implement reordered transactions, which will allow smart contracts to opt into a customized sequencing at a level higher than the priority fee market. For example, cancel_order will always take precedence over place_order - allowing makers to price orders more competitively with tighter spreads knowing they will not be exposed to excess risk. Tighter market maker spreads are a win for all - traders get better prices and depth of liquidity improves across the board.
Scheduled Transactions - Efficient trading operations require sub-millisecond precision to automate transactions and events. However, most applications today introduce several application layers to coordinate financial operations. Ultimately, the latency introduced by this coordination results in price inefficiency, increased fees, and risk for traders. That’s why an on-chain scheduler will be coming in the roadmap of improvement proposals this year. If adopted, it would allow for completely on-chain and automated transaction submission, triggered either by specific events (e.g., a price reaching your target) or at precise times. Imagine DeFi positions that auto-rebalance before liquidation, or NFT mints where your spot is automatically secured. Or powerful auto-bots running strategies that execute in under a millisecond. Decentralized trades on Aptos will be able to occur faster than the speed of light on a network cable.
X-Chain Accounts - In the coming weeks, support for X-Chain Accounts through the Aptos wallet adapter is expected. With X-Chain Accounts, capital inflows on Aptos become limitless - users will be able to use existing accounts and funds from any wallet on any non-Aptos blockchain to start trading instantly on any Aptos DEX. In a matter of moments, you can start trading on the Aptos blockchain - no new wallets, expensive on-ramps, clunky bridges, or excessive transaction signing needed. Just sign-in with your existing non-Aptos wallet and get moving. X-Chain accounts are implemented using a combination of Derived Account Abstraction, CCTP from our partners at Circle, and the Aptos Wallet Adapter. Additionally, developers will have the option to extend X-Chain Accounts with an implementation of subaccounts and session keys to unlock 1-click transactions. Here’s how this will help bring liquidity into the Aptos ecosystem, using the Phantom wallet on Solana as a hypothetical example, but any wallet across any ecosystem can be used:
Alice navigates to a DEX on the Aptos blockchain and uses her Phantom wallet to connect.
In the background, Derived Account Abstraction maps Alice’s Solana address to its DEX-specific counterpart on the Aptos network.
Alice signs one transaction on her Phantom wallet that approves the address on the Aptos network for the trading delegation entry function. This signature is submitted to the Aptos blockchain.
When Alice is ready to trade, she approves a transfer of USDC to her DEX account from Phantom. The DEX on Aptos uses Circle’s CCTP to bridge USDC to her DEX Account.
Alice can now transact directly on Aptos. She can trade freely on the platform without having to preview transactions in Phantom; session keys are used to access funds contained in her DEX Account.
Aptos' framework-level order book, reordered transactions, scheduled transactions, and X-Chain accounts will fundamentally open the floodgates for how liquidity moves through the Aptos ecosystem. Which brings me to…
Performance Upgrades
In 2024, Aptos showed its technical chops as the best place for developers to build the world’s global trading hub. The blockchain sustained heavy loads of over 11,000 TPS+, maintaining instant finality at a fraction of a cent in gas costs. In lab settings, the network’s parallel execution engine (Block-STM) demonstrated the ability to handle loads of up to 160,000 TPS and with Shardines showcasing over 1,000,000 TPS.
To date, Aptos is the fastest L1 in existence, breaking new records in March with
150ms blocktimes
. While we’re proud of our contributions to this accomplishment, we’re not going to rest on our laurels. Here are some improvement proposals that we’re working on next:
Raptr is the endgame for blockchain consensus—a high-throughput BFT protocol that achieves exceptionally low latency in optimal conditions while maintaining graceful performance degradation under Byzantine and network attacks. Its key innovation lies in a novel technique that combines the high throughput of the DAG-based approach with the low latency of the leader-based approach, all while ensuring network robustness.
Tiered Storage provides consistent and fast I/O performance even with billions of state items. The system manages frequently accessed data in the hot tier with high-speed memory, instead of the cold tier with slower disk storage. This means more speed and scalability, as Aptos manages high volumes of state-intensive operations without performance degradation.
Zaptos enhances the transaction pipeline by concurrently overlapping consensus, execution, and storage processes, extracting maximum parallelism and the best-in-class user latency.
Execution Pool acts as a buffer between consensus and execution stages, making sure that the execution engine can extract maximum parallelization from a transaction pool such that sequential workloads do not dominate the block space. This boosts the network resilience and predictability, no matter what the load.
Block-STM V2 enhances Aptos' parallel execution engine, scaling efficiently with increased cores. The network can handle far greater transaction volumes, even on a single node, translating to unprecedented scalability.
Think of Aptos like a streaming app that never buffers: Scheduled transactions auto-download new episodes as soon as they drop and the new order book is the unified real-time content catalog. Underneath, Raptr parallelizes requests so playback starts instantly, tiered storage holds popular content ready in memory, Zaptos overlaps fetching, playback, and updates to remove latency, and Block-STM V2 ensures the platform scales smoothly no matter how many viewers join.
User and Developer Experience
For the next wave of adoption, crypto needs to radically reimagine its on-ramps and user flows, making it seamless and delightful. Aptos is doing exactly that, focusing on one-time authentication, real-time execution, and intelligent operations through interfaces tailored explicitly for frictionless global trading.
Account abstraction on Aptos will allow any account to be authenticated through Move code, in addition to existing authentication schemes. This will enable users to define their own authentication logic, extending the potential of the Aptos blockchain beyond traditional cryptographic schemes. Account abstraction will offer a multitude of experiences from multi-sig accounts, “sandbox” (temporary) accounts to isolate assets for risk management, or the delegation of permissions to trusted applications – all of these unlock more frictionless and liquid trading experiences.
Permissioned Signer will be a more granular way to control the delegation functions granted to the smart contract. By constraining the permissions granted to applications over user accounts, accounts are further protected, and developers can build more intelligent, sophisticated financial operations with confidence. Some ideas that come to mind:
“Blind-signing” – users can pre-authorize transactions so they can be executed automatically, as long as they meet pre-defined conditions. Think of this as a secure form of “auto-signing” for trusted actions, granting specific permissions for a session or connection.
Agentic AI wallets that can automatically execute transactions and manage funds, keeping everything securely in the user’s self-custodial wallet
Recurring deposits into a lending pool based on custom thresholds set for APY or market size.
Stateless Accounts will solve one of the constraints applications face today: the cost associated with account resource creation. “Stateless” accounts begin with default values, and full account resources are only actually created when any default field is updated to a new value. This will enable any application, like DEXs where users have app-specific accounts for isolated positions, to efficiently create many accounts per user and support accounts for a massive number of users.
Petra and Aptos Connect will be coming together to fully unlock the Aptos DeFi ecosystem. We’re rolling out an expansion of Petra Earn to USDC, plus recurring deposits and more automations. Petra Extension will see some major upgrades too, so you can easily interact with our favorite Aptos apps. Plus, stay tuned for a fresh new look coming soon.
Aptos Build will be your best friend for launching and scaling apps on Aptos. We’ll be rolling out enhancements for no-code indexing, gas station, and native marketplaces to support DeFi applications with contract development, data, and analytics.
Slowly, Slowly, and Then All At Once
The world’s $190 trillion cross-border payments and $200+ trillion traditional financial markets are ripe for disruption. The crypto-native financial stack is emerging, but it needs infrastructure that’s purpose-built for scale and stability. Aptos is here to lead. Our vision is ambitious but focused—continuously pushing the boundaries of what's possible with blockchain-based technology while maintaining a steadfast commitment to user experience and real-world utility.
At Aptos Labs, we’re not just building communities or products or infrastructure. We're building the global trading engine.
Slowly, slowly, and then all at once.