Decibel goes live on Aptos with a $58 million war chest and a secret weapon from Stripe's Bridge
After a testnet with 700,000 accounts and $50 million in pre-deposits, Decibel begins mainnet trading with an onchain order book and risk engine on Aptos.
By Oliver Knight|Edited by Jamie Crawley Feb 26, 2026, 2:00 p.m.
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What to know:
- Decibel recorded 700,000+ accounts, 132,000 daily users and over 1 million daily trades during its public testnet.
- All order matching, settlement and margin logic execute onchain via smart contracts on Aptos.
- More than $50 million was committed ahead of mainnet; about 40% came from Ethereum and Solana users.
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 testing, and more than $58 million was committed through a pre-deposit campaign ahead of mainnet activation.
Decibel’s debut comes during an intensifying race among onchain perpetuals exchanges. The past year has seen a surge of competition, led by Hyperliquid, which remains the category’s dominant venue by volume.
Other contenders, including Aster and Lighter, briefly gained traction before fading from the spotlight. Decibel now enters that increasingly crowded field with plans to gain market share from a sector that racked up $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 occur entirely onchain. The model replaces the offchain risk engines and discretionary controls common in traditional and crypto exchanges with predefined smart contract rules visible to users.
The protocol will become 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 execute onchain.
Users can fund accounts from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana or centralized exchanges. Roughly 40% of pre-deposit capital originated from Ethereum and Solana, the foundation said. The platform uses a dollar-denominated stablecoin, usDCBL, issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, 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.
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