The Decibel Foundation announced on Wednesday that Decibel, a fully on-chain perpetuals exchange incubated by Aptos Labs, is now live on the Aptos mainnet. The launch follows a highly successful public testnet phase that attracted over 700,000 unique accounts and sustained 132,000 daily active users. During testing, users executed more than 1 million trades per day.
Ahead of the mainnet activation, the platform secured a significant war chest through a pre-deposit campaign, with more than $58 million committed by users. Notably, roughly 40% of this pre-deposit capital originated from the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems.
Decibel enters an intensively competitive sector for on-chain perpetuals exchanges, a category that has seen $920 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama. The field is currently led by Hyperliquid, with other contenders like Aster and Lighter having seen fluctuating traction.
The exchange operates using a central limit order book (CLOB) model where all functions—order placement, matching, settlement, and risk management—occur entirely on-chain. This model replaces the off-chain risk engines common in traditional finance with predefined smart contract rules, enhancing transparency.
As the first perpetual exchange built on the Aptos blockchain, Decibel leverages the network's high-performance capabilities, including sub-50 millisecond block times and sub-500 millisecond finality. Its matching engine, margin requirements, and liquidation logic all execute on-chain.
A key differentiator is Decibel's use of usDCBL, a dollar-denominated stablecoin issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, as the default collateral on the platform. Users can fund accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or centralized exchanges.
The Decibel Foundation has outlined an ambitious roadmap for expansion. Plans include adding spot markets, multi-collateral accounts, and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), with the long-term aim of evolving beyond crypto derivatives into a comprehensive financial ecosystem.
