Decibel Trade Activates Aptos Encrypted Mempool for Trades

Decibel Trade enabled the Encrypted Mempool on its onchain exchange on October 21, 2026, letting traders hide the details of an order while it is still waiting to be included in a block, according to Cryptobriefing. The Aptos-incubated venue built the option to reduce frontrunning and sandwich attacks, in which bots spot a large pending order and place trades around it.

The mechanism depends on a change to the underlying network. Crypto.news reported that Aptos activated its Encrypted Mempool on mainnet on October 12 under AIP-144, an improvement proposal authored by Aptos Labs cryptographer Rex Fernando, which introduced batch threshold encryption to the chain.

Key facts

• Decibel Trade switched the feature on October 21, 2026; Aptos’ network-level Encrypted Mempool went live on mainnet on October 12.
• Order payloads are encrypted client-side before submission, while the sender address and gas fee remain visible.
• Testing against the AptosBFT consensus implementation recorded roughly 20 milliseconds of added latency per block in a 50-node benchmark, per Crypto.news.
• Cryptobriefing reported Decibel has processed more than $8.2 billion in cumulative volume since its February 2026 mainnet launch, with about $1.3 billion in the prior 30 days.
• Decryption shares sit with each validator, so no single party can unlock a pending order before finalization.

How the order flow changes

Under a standard public mempool, transactions sit in a visible queue before validators package them into blocks. Anyone monitoring that queue can see what is coming and act first. Encrypting the payload removes that preview: the trade instructions stay unreadable during ordering and become legible only after consensus has fixed the block’s contents, shortly before execution.

Records remain onchain, so the contents can still be examined once processed. Aptos’ TypeScript software development kit supports encrypted submissions from version 7.0.0 onward, and Crypto.news reported that existing Move smart contracts need no changes to use the capability. The Petra wallet was first to expose encryption through its transaction signing, and Crypto.news described the feature on Decibel as opt-in, with ordinary transactions still available.

Built into consensus, not a relay

Cryptobriefing noted that many anti-MEV setups rely on a trusted third party, such as a private relay, to keep orders hidden, whereas Aptos placed the protection in its consensus layer with no extra hardware or outside trust mechanism. Keys are generated per epoch, and decryption requires the same stake-weighted threshold the chain already uses. A batch process lets one threshold reconstruction cover an entire block regardless of how many encrypted transactions it holds, according to Crypto.news.

The two outlets describe the performance cost slightly differently. Cryptobriefing put the added latency at roughly 20–27 milliseconds, about 14% overhead, and said tests handled over 1,000 transactions per second with low overhead. Crypto.news cited about 20 milliseconds per block in the 50-node benchmark and characterised the 1,000-plus transactions-per-second figure in the original proposal as a technical target rather than Decibel’s observed throughput.

Why it matters

Traders placing large orders are the immediate beneficiaries, since orders that bots can see in advance are the ones most exposed to worse fills. Decibel runs as a fully onchain central limit order book written in Move, covering crypto and commodities markets, so encryption applies to a venue where order flow is normally fully visible. Decibel’s deposit base has also shifted: Crypto.news, citing DefiLlama, put total value locked near $29.4 million on October 21, down from about $51 million at the end of February. That figure measures assets deposited in the protocol, not cumulative volume.

What to watch

The open questions are operational. Cryptobriefing flagged whether the latency overhead holds during volatile spikes when many traders race to submit at once, and noted that visible sender addresses and fees still leave room for observers to infer intent from patterns. AIP-144 itself identifies transaction simulation as a separate privacy gap, discussing split simulation and submission endpoints or disabling simulation by default when encryption is on. Also worth tracking: Decibel’s monthly volume against its recent $1.3 billion run rate, and whether other Aptos-based applications adopt the Encrypted Mempool.

Aptos’ APT traded at $0.834274 at the time of Crypto.news’ report, up 8.83%, with a market capitalisation of about $737.1 million and a circulating supply near 883.3 million tokens.

Disclaimer: This article is for information only and is not investment, financial or trading advice. Cryptocurrency prices are highly volatile. Always do your own research.

Sources: Crypto Briefing, Crypto.news