Decibel Adds Aptos Encrypted Mempool with 20 ms Extra Block Latency.

Decibel Trade activated Aptos' Encrypted Mempool on October 21, 2026. The opt-in feature hides order payloads before consensus, adds about 20 milliseconds of block latency in a 50-node test and keeps sender addresses and gas fees visible.

CryptoMEV Bot NewsroomOct 21, 20263 min read

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According to Crypto.news, Decibel Trade, an onchain trading exchange incubated by Aptos Labs, enabled Aptos' Encrypted Mempool on its platform on October 21, 2026. The optional feature encrypts transaction payloads before execution to reduce frontrunning and other transaction-manipulation risks while preserving onchain settlement.

How does Decibel's encrypted mempool reduce MEV exposure?

When a mempool is public, block producers can review transaction details before choosing the order. Automated bots could use that visibility to insert their own transactions before a user's order or bracket it with trades of their own.

For automated traders reviewing an Advanced Front-Running Bot for MEV, enabling encryption hides the called function and its inputs before ordering, whereas sender addresses and gas-fee data can still be seen. Decibel users can therefore select encryption for an individual transaction without changing the fact that the transaction is submitted and settled onchain.

Validators collectively decrypt protected orders only after consensus has finalized the block's contents and ordering, immediately before execution. The Aptos implementation therefore removes the readable transaction instructions from the public ordering stage, although it does not make every field private.

What information remains visible during trading?

Sender addresses and gas-fee information stay visible when a trader selects an encrypted submission. Encryption covers the transaction payload: the invoked function and inputs such as embedded trading instructions. Orders remain recorded on the blockchain, so their contents can be examined after processing.

Automated strategies such as those covered by a Profitable Sandwich Bot for Crypto Trading guide operate against a different visibility arrangement once encryption is enabled: pending instructions are concealed during ordering, but addresses and gas fees are not. The change does not remove the public identity fields that remain part of the submitted transaction.

Aptos gives validators distinct shares of the decryption material and requires the same stake-weighted threshold that secures consensus. One validator acting alone cannot reveal a pending transaction's encrypted contents. No separate private relay or external group of key holders is needed for this arrangement.

What did Aptos measure before the launch?

In a 50-node benchmark, tests against AptosBFT showed roughly 20 milliseconds of extra latency for every block. Aptos characterizes decryption as a batch operation intended to reduce computation and communication; one threshold reconstruction can handle a whole block irrespective of how many encrypted transactions it contains.

Although the original proposal set out support for more than 1,000 transactions per second, those numbers represent technical targets and test results rather than throughput actually observed at Decibel. Separately, Ching noted that Aptos decentralized infrastructure processes over 1,000 requests per second with terabytes uploaded per hour (TU News). That infrastructure metric is not presented as Decibel's measured exchange throughput.

The benchmark figure applies to Aptos' network testing rather than to a reported average experienced by every Decibel trader. Decibel's activation makes the capability available through the exchange while retaining the Aptos network's consensus-based decryption process.

Which tools and transactions support the feature?

Aptos introduced its encrypted mempool on the mainnet on October 12, 2026, under AIP-144, making it available to supported wallets and applications before Decibel enabled it on October 21. Version 7.0.0 of the Aptos TypeScript software development kit introduced support for encrypted submissions, and later versions retain it. Move contracts already in place can use the network-level capability without modification, and Petra became the first wallet to provide encryption directly during transaction signing.

After going live on mainnet in February 2026, Decibel used an order-book setup in which blockchain infrastructure handled matching and settlement. More than $50 million had been committed by Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs for trading infrastructure, research, and broader ecosystem initiatives, including Decibel. Its October 21 activation adds optional private order payloads to that existing onchain order-book structure.