Earlier this year, @Aptos holders voted to make their own chain 10x more expensive to use, and outside the ecosystem it barely got any attention. Which is a shame, because what happened afterwards goes against how most of us think about fees. Staking rewards were cut in half in the same package. Normally you’d expect activity to slowly bleed out after a move like that, but daily transactions actually doubled, going from ~4.5M to ~9M. Fees were so low to begin with that a median transaction is still among the cheapest of any major chain, so users barely felt it. The burn did, though. All gas on Aptos gets burned, so the same activity now takes a lot more aptos:native out of circulation than it used to. I hold aptos:native myself, so I’ll be straight about it. The network keeps getting better and the tech has honestly never been the problem, but the price just hasn’t caught up with any of this yet. That gap is exactly why I’m paying attention now. With issuance lower and investor and team vesting ending this October, usage is finally showing up on the supply side instead of only in the transaction count. @blockworksres calls this a path to deflation, and I like that they didn’t oversell it. aptos:native isn’t deflationary today and the burn still covers only a small part of issuance. The new activity is led by Decibel, the fully onchain perps order book incubated by Aptos Labs. Placing, adjusting and cancelling orders all hit the chain separately there, so a dollar traded on Decibel burns far more aptos:native than a dollar going through a regular swap. The breakeven point in Sam Schubert’s report sounds far away at first, but it’s not unrealistic next to what onchain perp venues already trade daily. The chain has also handled much heavier load than that, so the real question is usage. That’s why the number I’m watching from here is how much of issuance the burn covers each month. It’s where that usage shows up first, and it has already come a long way since March. I’d rather hold a token whose supply story depends on people actually using the chain than on an unlock calendar, and for the first time aptos:native feels like that kind of token. If the burn keeps catching up with issuance, I don’t think the market can ignore it forever. Long term, I’ve always been optimistic on aptos:native, and this gives me even more reason to stay that way.