📝 Editor’s Note: Network at a Glance

Welcome to the latest edition of our Ecosystem Mega Issue Series – where we showcase the overall health & growth of emerging ecosystems with data-driven, onchain coverage.

Today we’re excited to be covering Aptos – a high performance Layer 1 that launched on mainnet in October 2022 and has been on the MOVE in 2024 – hitting all-time high daily active addresses of 1.2M on June 8, 2024 and averaging 180k daily active addresses in Q3 2024 (a 28% Q/Q increase from Q2 2024). TVL has also jumped +294% YTD, from $174M to $685.5M, along with $1.7B in total bridging volume YTD.

This issue will take you through Aptos’ high level users trends, coverage on the chain's DeFi & consumer sectors, and give a data-driven look at emerging protocols being built on the network. This edition comes during the kickoff of Aptos Experience in Seoul, South Korea, an interactive web3 summit from Sept. 5-6.

– ON Editorial Team

• Since launch, Aptos has attracted nearly 22M users with 679k new users added during the week of Aug. 19. Recent milestones include the integration of Tether’s USDT, the first major stablecoin on a Move-powered ecosystem, and the 326M+ transactions processed in a single day in August. The network’s soaring transactions are attributed primarily to the launch of game developer Tapos' second game — a "tap-to-earn" game which generated 533M+ transactions over just 3 days in August.

• Having attracted nearly 22M unique users since launch <2 years ago, Aptos continues to exeperience user growth — the weekly average of daily active addresses (DAAs) on the chain has increased 3X since the start of the year from 65K to 180K.

• Bridging volumes on Aptos have hit $1.7B YTD. This comes from 5.2M unique bridging transactions driven primarily by LayerZero’s Stargate Bridge. 71% of this bridge volume ($1.2B) came earlier this year between Mar. 1 and May 1, incentivized by Stargate’s Aptos campaign. Weekly average bridge volume has since fallen >90% from $150M during the campign to $4M over the last 3 months.

• Aptos’ TVL is on the rise, currently standing at $685.5M, marking a 294% increase since the start of the year. 26% of the chains TVL ($177.4M) sits on Aries Markets, the chain's leading lending protocol. Another 20% ($136.5M) sits in Amnis Finance, a liquid staking protocol, followed by 19% ($129.4M) in Thala, a multi-product DeFi hub. Together these three protocols account for 2/3 of all TVL on the chain. While Aptos' TVL peaked in March at $778.9M, recent partnerships with Ondo Finance, Securitize & the suite of offerings launching via Aptos Labs’ Ascend program highlight the potential growth of institutional capital on the chain.

Aptos currently has a stablecoin market cap of $180.2M, with USDC making up 60% ($108.4M) of that. Stablecoin market cap is up 3.6x since the start of the year (from $49.3M). The integration of Tether's USDT, which commands ~70% of the stablecoin market with a supply exceeding $118B, is expected to bring additional liquidity to Aptos. DeFi protocols on Aptos, which collectively hold $685.5M in TVL, are also likely to benefit from USDT deployment into the ecosystem.

Aptos' DeFi ecosystem is continuing to expand. New protocols like Meso Finance, Superposition, Joule, Mizu, and Ziptos are already live with many more such as Aave, Mirage, and Thetis on the horizon. Panora recently became the 3rd largest DEX aggregator in the world by 24-hour volume (behind Jup and 1Inch), and Merkle’s cumulative volume has surpassed $13B while averaging $250M+/week in August just ahead of its token generation event (TGE) on Sept. 5.

• Econia is the hyper-parallelized onchain orderbook which runs on Aptos. One of the main benefits of orderbooks is their capital efficiency — orderbooks leverage concentrated liquidity to achieve superior pricing relative to automated market maker (AMM) DEXs. This is shown with Econia's $550k 24hr volume via its $1.65M TVL, a capital efficency ratio of 0.331.

• Econia's APT-lzUSDC trading pair continues to hold steady 24 hour volumes ranging between $500k to $1M, having hit ATHs of $1.7M on Aug 13.

Kana Labs offers an DeFi trading suite that integrates 9+ blockchains, including both EVM and non-EVM chains such as Aptos. Their offerings include cross-chain DEX aggregators, gas-free spot market platforms with advanced order types, and perpetuals options. The DEX aggregator has done $308M in cumulative volume YTD, with $11M+ each of the 1st three days of September, including its ATH of $12.4M on Aug. 31 just last week.

• Kana Labs partnered with SK Telecom, onboarding over 20,000 Web2 users to the “T Wallet” in South Korea. Powered by Kana Labs' cross-chain liquidity and bridge aggregator, T Wallet enables swaps directly from the wallet. This partnership bolstered Kana Labs' presence in the South Korean market and boosted the platform into the Top 5 DeFi applications by M/M percent user growth.

• Kana Labs' Paymaster on Aptos is empowering dApps to onboard more customers to their platform by sponsoring gas fees for the transactions. Paymaster is currently used by Kana Labs, Chingari, Wapal & Eragon and is sponsoring more than 250k+ transactions on daily basis for more than 100k users.

• To date, Aptos has recorded nearly 22M new users — 1.5M of which joined on June 3 alone. Several new consumer apps — like Kade’s Poseidon and Nameless, which merges blockchain with physical event experiences, have launched on Aptos and drove new users to the chain. This growth can likely continue, driven by Myco, the fast-growing Web3 streaming platform whose recent integration with Aptos is expected to to bring 3M+ active monthly viewers to the network this year.

• Five consumer applications on Aptos are bringing in >25k unique users per months (mUAW), with Chingari, a short-form video sharing app from India taking the top spot with just under 2M monthly users.

• Meanwhile, NFT activity continues to modestly move higher on Aptos, which notched $3M in NFT trading volume last week thanks to Rarible launching on the network as well as Aptos Monkeys, Kana Labs, Mercato and Wapal teaming up to mint 1M NFTs in 4 hours earlier this year. Also, in Q2, KYD Labs inked a deal with Le Poisson Rouge—the first major US venue to go fully onchain—onboarding hundreds of thousands of fans to Web3. With the integration of Aptos, KYD Labs adds to the 50K fans & 1M+ in ticket sales already generated on the platform in just 10 months.

• Tapos – a blockchain-based game that merges the concept of "tap-to-earn" gameplay with the nostalgia of interacting with virtual pets – helped Aptos break the record for number of daily transactions across all smart contract platform (326M).

• Tapos transactions are not simple: Each transaction updates global shared counter, user individual shared counter, utilizes on chain randomness technologies to allow users to purchase mystery chests and mint reward NFT. Despite the complexities, gas fees are consistently low and transaction latency is low. Despite the day-over-day increase of transactions on Aptos by 2,500%+ during Game 1 (May 2024) and nearly 5,000% during Game 2 (Aug. 2024), the gas fees on the chain have been very stable and consistently affordable (0.000008 APT/tx).

• Nameless is an events platform that connects your physical and digital experiences through seamless token distribution. At Bowery Land street festival in NYC, attendees could seamlessly collect branded vendor tokens via QR code scan in a digital scavenger hunt. There were >500 in-event interactions from 537 unique users during the 11 day festival.

• Nameless also provides digital and physical event engagement solutions for the Mallorca Championships, an ATP 250 professional tennis tournament —the events platform leveraged digital collectibles and targeted campaigns to turn casual fans into engaged community members. This campaign garnered 380k social impressions from 288 community members.