What is Aptos (APT) crypto?

Aptos crypto refers to the Aptos blockchain and its native coin, APT. Aptos is a layer 1 network, meaning it runs its own chain rather than sitting on top of another one. It was built by a team that came out of Meta's abandoned Diem payments project, and it focuses on speed and on safer smart contracts.

What is Aptos Labs?

Aptos Labs is the company that developed the network. It was formed in December 2021 by former Diem staff after Meta sold the Diem project, and it is led by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, according to a research report from Bit.com. The official Aptos site describes the network as founded by the team behind Libra/Diem.

Aptos Labs raised $150 million in July 2022, and the mainnet launched in October 2022, as reported by The Defiant. For a comparison with another newer layer 1, see what Sui is.

How does the Aptos blockchain work?

Aptos uses proof of stake. Anyone who stakes enough APT can run a validator, and voting power and rewards scale with the amount staked. As of October 2026, the docs list a minimum of 1 million APT to join the validator set, a 14-day lockup that renews automatically, and two-hour epochs. Its consensus system, AptosBFT, is a Byzantine fault tolerant design derived from DiemBFT.

The white paper describes a pipelined design in which the steps of sharing, ordering, executing and storing transactions run at the same time. This lets the chain process many transactions in parallel without developers declaring in advance which data each transaction touches.

What is APT used for?

APT has two main jobs:

• Fees. Every transaction pays gas in APT, priced in a small unit called Octas. The execution part of the fee is burned. A separate storage fee is charged for data kept on chain and is refunded if that data is later deleted.
• Staking. Validators and those who delegate to them lock up APT to secure the network and earn rewards, which are paid each epoch and added to the stake.

Stake also gives voting weight in on-chain governance, where protocol upgrades are decided.

What is the Aptos Move language?

Move was originally created by engineers at Facebook for the Diem payment network. Aptos uses it as its main smart contract language, which differs from Ethereum's Solidity.

Aptos says Move is designed to block whole classes of bugs, including reentrancy attacks, double spends and arithmetic overflows, through strict typing and checks when code is compiled. Code can also be verified when it runs. A tool called the Move Prover lets developers mathematically check that a contract always behaves as intended, and Aptos says its core framework contracts have been formally verified this way.

These features reduce some risks but do not remove them. Apps built on Aptos can still contain bugs, so it helps to research a crypto project before using it.