Payments on Aptos: Moving Money at the Speed of the Internet

Each year, more than $190 trillion flows across borders using infrastructure built long before the internet. Not surprisingly, these legacy systems are slow, costly, and limited by outdated rails and layers of intermediaries. It’s like trying to stream video over dial-up. In a world where content, communication, and computing are instant and borderless—moving money still often takes days. The scale is enormous (global financial markets involve well over $270 trillion in value), yet the foundation is creaking under its own weight.

That’s about to change.

Stablecoins: A Better Foundation for Money

Stablecoins—digital assets pegged to fiat currencies—have quickly evolved into real-world financial instruments. Today, stablecoins have reached $250 billion in liquidity and account for roughly 60 percent of all onchain transaction value. In 2024, onchain stablecoin transactions totaled approximately $24 trillion, with an estimated $7.6 trillion attributed specifically to payments.

These assets are programmable, composable, and always-on. They enable money to travel across networks with speed, finality, and flexibility. But to reach their full potential, stablecoins require a modern blockchain that matches their design: high throughput, low fees, and optimized for real-world utility.

Aptos: A Blockchain Built for Payments

The Aptos network is uniquely positioned to serve as the base layer for this new era of money movement. Designed for high throughput and ultra-low latency, the network routinely finalizes transactions in under a second and can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second as demand grows. Transaction fees are nearly zero—averaging around $0.00055—making micropayments not just possible, but practical.

Aptos smart contracts make money programmable and composable, enabling developers to integrate stablecoins into apps, automate workflows, and seamlessly connect to other on-chain services. In short, Aptos provides a blockchain purpose-built to move money at internet scale.

This vision is already taking shape. Aptos is one of the few blockchains to natively support the top three U.S. dollar stablecoins. Within months of launch, those assets surpassed $1.3 billion in circulation and now drive over $30 billion in monthly stablecoin volume on the network. These numbers rival the most active blockchains in crypto—and they’re growing fast.

Real Use Cases are Here

As more developers and enterprises build on Aptos, real-world payment use cases are emerging—powered by speed, scale, and the flexibility of programmable money:

• Send money across borders in seconds, without intermediaries or costly delays.
• Global payroll with instant, low-cost disbursement
• Merchant acceptance with no 3% card fee or waiting periods
• Financial institutions could disburse millions of payments on-chain, achieving finality in seconds instead of days.
• Micropayments for creators, developers, content, gaming, and IoT services

Unlike traditional rails, Aptos is borderless, 24/7/365, and programmable—giving developers and institutions a new foundation for financial innovation.

A New Chapter for Finance

This is more than a new blockchain feature—it’s the beginning of a new standard for payments. The convergence of stablecoins and a high-performance blockchain like Aptos means money can finally move as freely as information.

With continued innovation across the Aptos ecosystem, the network is emerging as one of the most performant, secure, and developer-friendly foundations for onchain payments. Developers, entrepreneurs, and institutions have the tools to build the future of payments.

Borderless, always-on finance isn’t a concept for the future—it’s happening now, on Aptos.

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