Aptos set the lowest price in its history on August 30, 2026, at $0.5112. Less than two weeks later the chain released another 11.31 million APT into circulation, and the token gave up about 7% on the day to trade near $0.62. On paper the release looked minor. It came to 0.65% of released supply, worth around $7.09 million.
Where those tokens went is the part most trackers skip over. About 3.96 million of them went to core contributors and 2.81 million to early investors. Put those together and close to 60% of the unlock landed with insiders. A community allocation took 3.21 million, and the foundation kept 1.33 million.
Every monthly Aptos release carries roughly this shape, and it has held steady while APT walked down toward its record low.
Who actually collects a routine unlock
A headline percentage treats every token as the same. A release of 0.65% sounds like a rounding error, the sort of figure that should not register in a market. The weight changes once you see who receives it. Contributors and funds that were granted APT years ago, at valuations far below today's, collect fresh tokens each month into a market that trades around $110 million a day.
The LayerZero unlock that went 94% to insiders was a louder version of the same mechanic. Aptos is quieter about it, which is part of why the pattern goes unremarked. Quiet dilution is still dilution.
Most of the supply still has not arrived
Aptos circulates about 858.7 million APT. The maximum supply is 2.1 billion. Close to four years after launch, only about 41% of the tokens that will ever exist are actually trading.
The fully diluted valuation sits near $750 million against a market value of roughly $533 million, so around $217 million of supply is still scheduled to land, much of it on the monthly cadence that paid out this week. Fully diluted valuation is the number that captures this gap, and for a token this far below its peak the gap is not academic. New supply has to find a buyer. Right now buyers are thin, and the order books show it.
A larger release landed next door the same week
Aptos was not the only chain opening its vault. A day earlier Linea released 960 million of its own tokens, a far larger count, and it too was framed as routine housekeeping. The contrast is useful. Both unlocks were pitched as small against total supply, and both added sellable tokens to markets that were already soft.
For APT the slide to a record low on August 30 came before this release, not because of it. That timing matters. It points to selling pressure that is structural, tied to the supply schedule itself rather than to any single unlock date.
APT now trades around $0.62, about 21% above its low but still down roughly 97% from the $19.92 it reached in January 2023. The token ranks near 103rd by market value, and Aptos keeps shipping product. None of that is fatal on its own. What it does mean is plain enough: anyone buying APT today is buying into a schedule that keeps handing tokens to the earliest holders, month after month, with the bulk of the float still ahead.