Aptos Price Surges as Traders Fuel ‘Community Takeover’ With Memes

A little-known memer named BuzzlamicJihad launched an unofficial “community takeover” of layer-1 blockchain Aptos, and two months after Aptos Labs founder and CEO Mo Shaikh stepped down, it’s finally catching on—and fueling a massive price surge.

Aptos (APT) has spiked 17% over the past 24 hours to a current price of $6.45, according to CoinGecko, making the token the third-biggest gainer in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap during that span. The token’s daily peak price of $6.57 is the highest mark seen since February 2.

There doesn’t appear to be much to the community takeover, or CTO, aside from a significant boost in vibes, attention, and memes. “Aptos lookin’ good here” has become the meme message of the day as crypto degens turn to buying up an established layer-1 blockchain’s native token, rather than aping into oft-ephemeral meme coins.

A CTO occurs when a group of investors takes the reins of a project. The concept was popularized in the crypto trenches due to meme coin deployers often abandoning their creations within minutes of launching. In this case, however, it is a layer-1 network, not a meme coin, and the Aptos team hasn’t abandoned anything—so it’s anything but a conventional example.

BuzzlamicJihad first started posting about Aptos on X in October 2024, claiming that it was easier to write contracts for the chain than rival layer-1 network Sui.

By December, BuzzlamicJihad had become a full Aptos bull, claiming that it would soon flip XRP and predicting by the end of 2025 that the chain would have more stablecoin supply than all other chains combined.

Once Shaikh left Aptos on December 19, the now-CTO lead proclaimed that it had marked the bottom of Aptos, and that they were buying more once it was clear that co-founder Avery Ching was to assume the role of CEO. He soon started declaring that the CTO was “not priced in” when looking at Aptos—a phrase he repeated at least seven times through January.

Aptos Labs did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment. That said, it appears that Ching has acknowledged the “looking good here” meme, and called BuzzlamicJihad the GOAT, or greatest of all time.

BuzzlamicJihad has slowly been building his meme-driven CTO narrative, popularizing the “Aptos looking good here” phrase. In the process of spreading the meme, the CTO lead has annoyed some people in which they simply question: “Sidelined?” This suggests that people are only mad because they aren’t personally benefiting from the Aptos pump.

Over the past 24 hours, the vibes have flipped as the crypto community and some notable influencers have rallied behind BuzzlamicJihad, fueling the belief that Aptos actually does look good here—despite being down 68% from its all-time high.

Now, the vibes on Aptos are akin to those of popular Ethereum NFT project Milady Maker, in the way that layers of irony and in-jokes are thrown at anyone that peers into the community.

When Decrypt asked in the Aptos CTO Telegram channel if it could interview the team, one person responded, “There is no team, I love you,” in reference to a classic Milady meme. Another said, “It’s not a meme, it’s a movement,” while someone else responded, “Kill yourself.”

“[We are] just some lads with a dream, following Buzz to infinity and beyond,” Telegram chat admin Stef told Decrypt of BuzzlamicJihad, whose X profile picture features Toy Story‘s Buzz Lightyear. “As [natural] as it gets.”

While unofficial, the rebrand is akin to when Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin embraced the Milady community in January. While it had no direct effect on the network’s technical capabilities, it pleased some community members as it shook up the declining vibes around the chain. This led some crypto personalities to call it a “wartime mode” for the Ethereum creator.

Amid the memes, people in the Telegram chat are also educating each other about the Aptos network. Specifically, the chat is filled with people teaching each other how to bridge to Aptos, and shilling tokens on the Emojicoin.fun protocol—essentially a launchpad like Solana’s Pump.fun, but all of the meme coins are emojis. The largest token by market cap on Emojicoin.fun is Red Envelope at $13.8 million, as of this writing.

Those behind the Aptos community takeover are rocking the globe emoji with a military helmet as the symbol for the Aptos trenches. And just like the Ethereum vibe shift, some are proclaiming that it is now “wartime mode” for Aptos, as well.

Edited by Andrew Hayward