The Decibel Foundation said on Wednesday that Decibel, a fully on-chain sustainable exchange incubated by Aptos Labs, is now online on the Aptos mainnet.
The debut comes after a public testnet attracted more than 700,000 unique accounts and 132,000 daily active users, according to the foundation. During testing, users performed over 1 million transactions per day and committed over $58 million through pre-deposit campaigns ahead of mainnet activation.
Decibel’s debut comes amid fierce competition among on-chain perpetual contracts exchanges. Competition has surged over the past year, led by Hyperliquid, which still dominates the category by volume.
Other contenders, including Aster and Lighter, briefly gained attention before disappearing from the spotlight. Decibel now enters this increasingly crowded space with plans to gain market share from an industry that saw trading volume reach $920 billion in the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama.
Decibel operates a central limit order book, with order placing, matching, settlement and risk management occurring entirely on-chain. This model replaces the off-chain risk engines and discretionary controls common in traditional and cryptocurrency exchanges with predefined smart contract rules visible to users.
The protocol will be the first permanent exchange built on Aptos, a layer 1 blockchain with sub-50ms block times and sub-500ms finality. Decibel’s matching engine, margin requirements, and liquidation logic are executed on-chain.
Users can fund accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or centralized exchanges. The foundation said about 40% of pre-deposited funds come from Ethereum and Solana. The platform uses usDCBL, a U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin issued by Stripe company Bridge, as default collateral.
The Decibel Foundation said it plans to add spot markets, multi-collateral accounts and tokenized real-world assets, with the aim of expanding beyond crypto derivatives over time.
