Decibel launches on Aptos with an onchain trading engine for spot, perps, and yield

Decibel, a fully onchain trading engine and interface, launched Tuesday on Aptos with backing from the newly formed Decibel Foundation and Aptos Labs, aiming to deliver centralized-exchange speed with DeFi transparency.

Positioned as neutral market infrastructure rather than a single exchange front end, Decibel is designed to serve as the execution layer in Aptos' financial stack. Alongside payment rails for stablecoins and Shelby for real-time, decentralized data storage, Decibel is meant to give traders and builders unified liquidity, programmable automation, and instant settlement within a wallet-native experience.

The initial release is live on Devnet in an invite-only test environment offering simulated high-speed execution, cross-margin accounts, and composable yield strategies, the team said.

Avery Ching, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, called the launch a step toward a vision where all assets are tokenized and tradable on-chain and "capital markets operate 24/7 without borders."

"Decibel reflects what we’ve always believed at Aptos Labs — that the next generation of financial systems should be fast, open, and programmable," Ching added.

Decibel debuts as onchain trading infrastructure expands. The team noted that in the second quarter, DEX volumes approached the high hundreds of billions, and DeFi usage climbed to double-digit millions of active wallets.

Many projects still rely on fragmented venues or third-party exchanges that can limit composability. To address this, Decibel’s pitch is one engine for spot, perpetual futures, and yield that routes order flow and data through a single system.

Aptos is a Layer 1 blockchain focused on high throughput and low latency. It uses the Move smart-contract language and Block-STM to execute many transactions in parallel, aiming for fast finality and low fees at scale. Aptos Labs, founded by engineers who previously worked on Meta’s Diem blockchain project, develops core protocol upgrades and tooling used by solutions within the Aptos ecosystem.