Aptos CEO Avery Ching: Financial Efficiency Revolution Not Even 1%, Best Times Are Ahead
Avery Ching, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, stated that the financial transformation aimed at making funds and assets flow faster and cheaper has "not even completed 1%", and the best times are still ahead.
Ching, a tech entrepreneur from the public chain sector, previously participated in the technical development of the Libra/Diem stablecoin project and the Novi wallet at Meta. In 2019, Meta launched Libra, planning to issue a global stablecoin, which faced strong opposition from the U.S. Congress and central banks worldwide. After being renamed Diem, the related assets were sold to Silvergate for approximately $182 million in early 2022. The original team members then founded Aptos, continuing to use the Move programming language developed for Diem. In December 2024, former CEO Mo Shaikh stepped down, and Ching took over as CEO from CTO. Aptos has raised approximately $400 million, with investors including a16z, Dragonfly, Haun Ventures, Hashed, Coinbase, PayPal, and Franklin Templeton.
His remarks are based on data from Aptos's nearly year-long bet on "on-chain financial settlement". According to Aptos's annual report, from April 2025 to May 2026, approximately 2.95 billion transactions were processed on-chain, a year-on-year increase of 532%. The market capitalization of on-chain stablecoins grew by 91%, reaching a historical high of about $1.95 billion, with a peak monthly trading volume of approximately $68.13 billion. The value of on-chain RWA increased by 58.5%, reaching $869.9 million, with products including BlackRock's tokenized money market fund BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's FOBXX, and Ondo's USDY. In October 2025, BlackRock added a $500 million BUIDL stake on Aptos, at which point Aptos's RWA scale was once reported to be about $1.2 billion, ranking high among all public chains.
Performance and privacy are Aptos's main selling points. By December 2025, the block time of the Aptos mainnet had dropped to under 50 milliseconds, with final confirmation times below 400 milliseconds, and peak daily transaction volumes nearing 10 million. In April 2026, it launched the "Confidential APT" feature based on zero-knowledge proofs; in June, Ching announced that confidential assets and cross-border stablecoin settlements were officially running on the mainnet, allowing users to complete international stablecoin transfers while protecting transaction privacy. The next-generation consensus protocol Raptr, parallel execution engine Block-STM V2, and a central limit order book (CLOB) at the protocol layer are also under development.
Institutional partnerships and token economics are also being adjusted simultaneously. In March 2026, Aptos announced a partnership with Mastercard to build payment infrastructure; Franklin Templeton chose Aptos as one of the accounting chains for its Benji tokenized fund; and the private credit platform PACT moved all its loan business onto Aptos. The governance proposal No. 183 passed in the same month set the total supply cap of APT at 2.1 billion, with 100% of all Gas fees burned, and staking rewards reduced from 5.19% to about 2.6% to decrease token inflation. In terms of derivatives, the U.S. licensed exchange Bitnomial has launched APT futures, and Bitwise is advancing its APT spot ETF application.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is a narrative-driven statement that does not directly correspond to trading. It points to the competition among public chains for shares of "stablecoin settlement and tokenized assets": institutional issuers and payment companies are the buyers, choosing chains that are low-cost, fast, and compliance-friendly to deploy assets; various public chains are the sellers, competing for deployment with performance, privacy, and ecological subsidies. Funds are shifting from trading and investment scenarios to payment settlements and yield-generating assets like tokenized government bonds. Beneficiaries include stablecoin issuers, tokenized funds, and public chains that secure institutional deployments; those under pressure are traditional channels relying on correspondent banking networks for cross-border payments. Within the public chain ecosystem, Aptos needs to compete with Solana, Ethereum and its layer-two networks, as well as Sui, which also originated from the Diem team, for the same batch of institutional clients.
Source: Public information
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Aptos's starting point is a "global currency experiment" that was halted by regulators. In 2019, Meta's Libra project aimed to issue a global stablecoin backed by a basket of currencies, but faced multiple hearings in the U.S. Congress and public opposition from France and Germany to prevent its launch in Europe, leading to the withdrawal of founding members like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. The project was sold in early 2022, and core technical personnel split into two factions: Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching founded Aptos, while another group founded Mysten Labs and launched Sui. Aptos completed a $200 million funding round led by a16z in March 2022 and a $150 million round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto in July of the same year. A few months later, after FTX's bankruptcy, Aptos faced skepticism when it launched its mainnet in October 2022 due to actual throughput being far below expectations and insufficient disclosure of token distribution information, resulting in significant price volatility for APT after launch.
From a capital pathway perspective, Aptos chose a route of "first engaging institutions, then building the ecosystem". In August 2023, it partnered with Microsoft to launch an AI assistant based on Azure OpenAI and established collaborations with South Korea's SK Telecom, hedge fund Brevan Howard, and Boston Consulting Group. It then focused its resources on three main areas: securing deployments of tokenized funds from asset management institutions like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Ondo; collaborating with Mastercard to streamline payments; and reducing block times to the millisecond level while launching privacy transfers to meet institutional demands for speed and confidentiality. Proposal No. 183 aimed to reduce staking rewards, set a total supply cap, and burn all Gas fees, transforming APT from a high-inflation token into a value-capturing asset linked to network usage.
Historically, Ripple proposed using blockchain to transform cross-border payments as early as 2012, signing contracts with hundreds of financial institutions, but XRP was sued by the U.S. SEC in 2020, causing its business to stagnate in the U.S. for years. In 2015, SWIFT launched the gpi project, shortening the arrival time of most cross-border remittances to within a day, indicating that the traditional system is also upgrading itself. A more recent example is Stripe: in 2024, it acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion and in 2025 launched a public chain called Tempo specifically designed for payments. Circle also launched its own Arc chain. The industry is in a phase of "stablecoin payments moving from concept to large-scale commercial use", with competitors expanding from crypto-native public chains to dedicated chains built by payment giants.
Essentially, this is a transfer of pricing power, competing for the "toll fees" of global capital flows. According to the World Bank, the average cost of global cross-border remittances has long been around 6%, with hundreds of billions of dollars in remittance flows supporting the correspondent banking network, SWIFT messaging system, and foreign exchange intermediaries. Blockchain settlement reduces transfer costs to a few cents and shortens arrival times from one or two days to less than one second, compressing the remittance fees and foreign exchange spreads previously charged by banks into the Gas fees of public chains and the reserve interest of stablecoin issuers. This transfer is occurring because legislative measures like the U.S. GENIUS Act provide a legal basis for institutions to use on-chain dollars compliantly; once institutions can legally settle with stablecoins, prices will quickly converge towards the lowest-cost channels. Ching's statement that "not even 1% has been completed" measures this point: while the monthly trading volume of on-chain stablecoins has reached hundreds of billions of dollars, it remains insignificant compared to the global daily foreign exchange and payment clearing scale of tens of trillions of dollars.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- Every acceleration in finance dismantles an intermediary.
- The higher the toll fees, the sooner new pipelines will bypass them.
- Technologies halted by regulators do not disappear; they simply re-emerge under a different name.