Decibel, a fully onchain perpetuals exchange incubated by Aptos Labs, is now live on the Aptos mainnet, the Decibel Foundation said Wednesday.
The debut follows a public testnet that drew more than 700,000 unique accounts and 132,000 daily active users, according to the foundation. Users executed over 1 million trades per day during the test, and more than $58 million were committed through a pre-deposit campaign prior to mainnet activation.
Decibel’s debut comes amid an intensifying race between onchain perpetuals exchanges. The past year has seen a wave of competition, led by Hyperliquid, which remains the category’s dominant venue by volume.
Other competitors, including Aster and Lighter, briefly gained traction before fading from the limelight. Decibel is now entering the increasingly crowded field with plans to gain market share from a sector that has gained $920 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days, according to DeFiLlama.
Decibel operates a central limit order book, where order placement, matching, settlement and risk management take place exclusively on the chain. The model replaces offchain risk engines and discretionary controls common in traditional and crypto exchanges with predefined smart contract rules visible to users.
The protocol will be the first perpetual exchange built on Aptos, a layer-1 blockchain with sub-50 millisecond block times and sub-500 millisecond finality. Decibel’s matching engine, margin requirements and liquidation logic are performed on-chain.
Users can fund accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana or centralized exchanges. About 40% of pre-deposit capital came from Ethereum and Solana, the fund said. The platform uses a dollar-denominated stablecoin, usDCBL, issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, as default security.
The Decibel Foundation said it plans to add spot markets, multi-collateral accounts and real-world tokenized assets with the goal of expanding beyond crypto derivatives over time.
