Aptos Payments: Moving Money at Internet Speed

Aptos is emerging as a leading infrastructure for global on-chain payments, enabling fast, scalable, and low-cost stablecoin transactions in real-world scenarios.
Stablecoins, with a market cap of $250B and $24T in on-chain transactions (2024), offer programmable, borderless payments but require high-performance blockchains like Aptos to unlock their potential.
Aptos processes transactions in under 1 second with fees as low as $0.00055, supports major USD stablecoins, and has already facilitated over $30B in monthly stablecoin volume.
Real-world use cases include:
- Cross-border transfers (instant, no intermediaries)
- Global payroll (low-cost, instant payments)
- Merchant payments (bypassing 3% credit card fees)
- Institutional settlements (millions of transactions in seconds)
- Micropayments for content/gaming (millisecond speed)
Aptos’ programmability and scalability position it as a foundational layer for the next era of internet-speed financial flows, bridging the gap between traditional finance and decentralized innovation.

The original article comes from Aptos Labs and is published by Movemaker with permission.

TL;DR: Aptos is rapidly becoming the fastest and most scalable infrastructure in the global on-chain payment field, and has promoted the large-scale implementation of stablecoin payments in real scenarios.

More than $190 trillion flows across borders each year, but the financial infrastructure behind it was born before the internet. As you can imagine, these legacy systems are slow, expensive, and constrained by old networks and complicated intermediaries. It's like watching HD video on a dial-up connection. In a world where content, communication, and computing are instantaneous and borderless, cross-border remittances still take days to arrive. Despite its scale (the value of global financial markets is well over $270 trillion), its foundations are overwhelmed and shaky.

And this situation is about to change.

Stablecoins: A better monetary payment paradigm

Stablecoins are digital assets pegged to fiat currencies that have rapidly evolved into real-world financial instruments. Today, the total market value of stablecoins has reached $250 billion, accounting for about 60% of all on-chain transactions. In 2024, the total on-chain stablecoin transactions will be about $24 trillion, of which about $7.6 trillion will be used for payments.

Stablecoins are programmable, composable, and always online, allowing currencies to circulate quickly, securely, and flexibly across networks. However, to truly unleash their potential, stablecoins require a modern blockchain that matches their design philosophy: high throughput, low fees, and optimized for real-world application scenarios.

Aptos: Blockchain for Payments

The Aptos network is known for its high performance and ultra-low latency, and is an ideal infrastructure for the new era of on-chain payments. The Aptos network can complete transaction confirmation in less than 1 second, and can be expanded to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in the future. The transaction fee is almost negligible, averaging only $0.00055, making micropayments no longer just a concept, but a real possibility.

Aptos’ smart contracts make funds “programmable”, allowing developers to integrate stablecoins into applications, automate workflows, and even collaborate efficiently with other on-chain services. In short, Aptos is a blockchain built specifically for “internet-scale capital flows.”

This vision has already taken shape: Aptos is one of the very few blockchains that natively supports the three major USD stablecoins. A few months after launch, the circulation of stablecoins on Aptos has exceeded $1.3 billion, and the current monthly stablecoin trading volume exceeds $30 billion. These numbers are comparable to the most active blockchains in the cryptocurrency field, and are still growing rapidly.

Real-world payment scenarios are already happening at Aptos

As more developers and businesses choose Aptos to build applications, real-world payment use cases are emerging—all thanks to Aptos’ speed, scale, and programmability:

Cross-border transfers: Send money across borders in seconds without intermediaries or delays
Global salary payment: instant payment and extremely low cost
Merchant collection: 3% credit card processing fee waived, no waiting period
Financial institutions: Millions of payments can be processed on-chain at once and settled in seconds rather than days.
Content and creator economy: Supports millisecond-level micropayments and is suitable for content, games, and IoT scenarios

Unlike traditional financial channels, Aptos is borderless, all-weather, and programmable, providing developers and institutions with a new foundation for financial innovation.

A new chapter in finance

This is not only a breakthrough in blockchain technology, but also heralds a new upgrade in payment standards. The combination of stablecoins and high-performance blockchains such as Aptos means that the flow of funds will be as free and efficient as the dissemination of information.

Driven by the ever-innovating Aptos ecosystem, the network is gradually becoming the most powerful, secure, and developer-friendly cornerstone in the on-chain payment field. Developers, entrepreneurs, and financial institutions are leveraging Aptos' capabilities to build the future of payments.

A borderless, always-on financial network is no longer a distant future - it is happening right now on Aptos.