Decibel is a fully on-chain perpetual exchange developed by Aptos Labs and currently running on the Aptos mainnet, the Decibel Foundation announced on Wednesday.
The foundation said the debut follows a public testnet that attracted more than 700,000 unique accounts and 132,000 daily active users. During testing, users executed more than 1 million transactions per day and more than $58 million was committed through pre-funding campaigns ahead of mainnet activation.
Decibel’s debut comes amid increasing competition among on-chain perpetual exchanges. Over the past year, competition has increased, led by Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid remains the dominant venue in this category in terms of volume.
Other candidates, including Astor and Reiter, briefly gained attention but then faded from the spotlight. Decibel is now entering an increasingly crowded field with plans to gain market share from a sector that has recorded $920 billion in trading volume in the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama.
Decibel operates a central limit order book where order entry, matching, settlement, and risk management are all done on-chain. This model replaces the off-chain risk engine and discretionary controls common in traditional crypto exchanges with predefined smart contract rules that are visible to users.
The protocol will be the first perpetual exchange built on Aptos, a layer 1 blockchain with block times of less than 50ms and finalities of less than 500ms. Decibel’s matching engine, margin requirements, and clearing logic are performed on-chain.
Users can fund their accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or centralized exchanges. The foundation said about 40% of its pre-deposit funds came from Ethereum and Solana. The platform uses usDCBL, a dollar-denominated stablecoin issued by Stripe’s Bridge, as default collateral.
The Decibel Foundation said it plans to add spot markets, multi-collateralized accounts, and tokenized real-world assets with the aim of expanding beyond crypto derivatives over time.
