Aptos token gains 51% in four weeks, outpacing Bitcoin and Ether

Aptos has quietly put together one of the better months in large-cap crypto. According to The Defiant, the APT token gained 51% over four weeks, a run that left both Bitcoin and Ether trailing.

The rally has a catch. Stablecoin liquidity on the Aptos network has been heading the opposite direction, which raises a fair question about what is actually fueling the move.

The numbers behind the run

Price trackers don’t fully agree on the size of the gain. The Defiant puts it at 51%, while other tracking reports show gains of 38.5% to 44% for the four weeks ending October 13, 2026.

Whichever figure you pick, APT beat the two largest crypto assets over the same window. The token traded in a range of roughly $0.82 to $0.85 as of mid-October.

Zoom in to the past seven days and the picture gets less exciting. APT’s weekly return has been nearly flat, which suggests most of the heavy lifting happened earlier in the month.

The less flattering number comes from DefiLlama. The stablecoin market cap it tracks on Aptos fell approximately 17.5% over four weeks, landing at about $910 million.

Stablecoins are the working capital of any blockchain economy. A shrinking pool generally means less dry powder sitting inside the ecosystem, ready to be deployed.

So the token got more expensive while the money sitting on the network got thinner. That divergence is the main tension in this story.

The unlock cliff, now in the rearview mirror

The most concrete catalyst landed on October 12, 2026. That date marked the completion of Aptos’s four-year token unlock schedule for early contributors and investors.

With the schedule finished, APT’s monthly emissions dropped by around 60%. Releases fell from approximately 11.3 million tokens per month to roughly 4.5 million.

It also helps explain the timing. A rally into a known supply reduction is a classic pattern, as traders position ahead of the event rather than after it.

A busy stretch for Aptos Labs

The unlock was not the only development. Around October 9, 2026, Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation announced more than $50 million in commitments aimed at on-chain trading infrastructure and AI-related projects.

On the technical side, Aptos launched an optional encrypted mempool on mainnet on October 12-13, 2026. The feature is designed to protect users from MEV, or maximal extractable value. MEV refers to profits that bots and validators can extract by seeing pending transactions and reordering or front-running them. Encrypting the waiting room means outsiders can’t read your order before it executes.

There is also a proposal on the table for a new execution engine called MonoMove, aimed at improving smart contract performance by up to 55 times. That is a proposal, not a shipped product.

What this means for APT holders and the network

The bear case lives in the DefiLlama data. A 17.5% slide in on-chain stablecoins points to liquidity leaving, not arriving. DeFi total value locked on Aptos remains low, which reinforces the concern that price has moved ahead of usage.

The $50 million in commitments toward trading infrastructure looks partly like a response to that exact problem. The encrypted mempool fits the same strategy, since MEV protection is a selling point for active traders choosing where to deploy capital.

The stablecoin figure on DefiLlama is the number to watch. If it stabilizes or recovers while APT holds its gains, the rally has firmer footing. If it keeps falling, the price move starts to look more like a supply-driven trade than a vote of confidence in the ecosystem.