How one game caused Aptos daily transactions to surge 1,466% in three days

The 7-day moving average of the number of user transactions on Aptos skyrocketed to 47 million at the end of May, showing stark growth considering that at the start of the month, the moving average never exceeded 1 million. Un-averaged, the number of transactions reached 156 million.

For those who need a refresher on Aptos, it launched in October 2022 with a lot of hype. It stemmed from Facebook’s Libra blockchain initiative and had many big-name backers. It was marketed as a new alternative to Solana for developers since it utilized the Move programming language and was supposed to be much easier to build on.

Aptos is the 17th largest network by total value locked and is a well-known name within the crypto space, even though it is not always the most talked about.

Aptos does seem to have a penchant for drawing in big-name partners, collaborating with Microsoft, Brevan Howard, Universal Pictures, and Google Cloud on various initiatives and projects to improve the ecosystem and bring wider adoption.

The recent surge does not seem to be tied to any recent mass adoption of the Aptos blockchain but rather a new game called "Tapos."

The number of user transactions rose from 3 million on May 23 to 47.18 million on May 26.

"Tapos" is a clicker game. Each click executes a transaction that increments the player's counter. The game lets users tickle a cat with each click and earn HEART tokens in return (although they still have to pay the gas fee for the transactions, which is very low, around 0.000008 APT, worth less than one-hundredth of a cent).

The amount of HEART earned is based on how many tickles a player did in a game period compared to how many tickles were done by all the players, so more clicks should translate to more tokens.

Given the structure of the game, it’s not surprising that we’d see transactions surge like this. The 7-day moving average of active addresses on Aptos has also picked up, climbing from 61,000 in early May to over 150,000 by the end of the month. This could be partially tied to the game, which seems to have launched closer to the end of May.

On May 26, though, the "Tapos" account posted that its campaign had ended and that it would update with the next steps of the game. In a few days, the project boasted over 323 million transactions and over 63,000 users. Naturally, the end of "Tapos" meant the end of the high transaction count, and we’ve now started to see the moving average come down again.

While short-lived, "Tapos's" success highlights areas where Aptos excels. A game with this much transaction demand would struggle on certain higher fee networks, and the counter mechanism also takes advantage of some native Aptos functionality.

This is an excerpt from The Block's Data & Insights newsletter. Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.