Aptos found tokenomics' oldest cheat code: charge more, pay less.
Between Feb and March, holders voted to 10x gas fees, halve staking rewards to a flat 2.6%, cap supply at 2.1B APT, and permanently lock 210M. Per Blockworks Research, the chain now burns more in fees than it pays validators. Token Holder Net Income flipped positive in May and stayed there.
Token Autopsy: The good part is real. Fees went up 10x and daily transactions still doubled to ~9M. The median tx costs $0.0003. Turns out nobody was staying for the discount.
Now the fine print. The burn covers ~10% of issuance. Not 100%. Actual deflation needs roughly 10x today's activity.
98% of Aptos transactions come from one venue, Decibel, incubated by Aptos Labs. That's not a fee market. That's a house band.
And the scorecard is Blockworks' own metric, in a report funded by the Aptos Foundation. Disclosed, to their credit.
Winners: holders, with net supply growth down ~70% and zero new mechanisms. Losers: incentive farmers, who learned free blockspace was the whole strategy.
Any L1 crying about "value accrual" could pass the same three votes tomorrow. So why haven't they?
https://x.com/blockworksres/status/2112555028758323203