Decibel is building on Aptos to become the world's most powerful and trusted decentralized exchange, driving innovation in trading and markets. Mainnet Beta is imminent, and Testnet is live, with an average of 132K daily active accounts during its recent trading competition.
On Feb. 12, the Decibel Foundation announced usDCBL, which will be Decibel's default collateral. When traders deposit USDC into Decibel, they sign an onchain transaction that converts their funds into usDCBL. In doing so, the protocol will earn value on the stablecoin’s assets held in reserve, such as U.S. T-Bills, that it would not otherwise earn without a revenue-sharing agreement with Circle.
USDC pre-deposits to Decibel opened on Feb. 10 and run through Feb. 24, with participants eligible to earn Season 0 Decibel points (AMPs), USDC-denominated rewards, priority access to Mainnet Beta, and early allocation to Decibel Liquidity Provider (DLP) vault.
The DLP is Decibel’s professionally-managed primary market maker and backstop liquidator, accepting deposits from LPs who earn a share of liquidation fees and market-making profits.
Decibel is built on Aptos, the fastest major L1 by block time, with fully onchain execution, composability, and transparency. Key differentiators include Aptos’s low, predictable fees and parallel transaction execution via its Block-STM engine, which delivers sub-second finality.
Primer
Decibel is a fully onchain perpetual futures trading protocol built on Aptos, the fastest major L1 by block time (~50ms), with settlement in roughly 125ms. The protocol offers up to 40x leverage and gasless trades, operating via a unified orderbook (one shared book per market), cross-margin accounts (one collateral pool for all of a user’s perp positions), and continuous ~one-second funding every oracle update (as opposed to 1-hour or more funding models). Chainlink oracles provide 24/7 pricing for crypto assets and 24/5 for equity markets.
Like the HLP for Hyperliquid and the LLP for Lighter, the protocol-owned Decibel Liquidity Provider (DLP) vault is Decibel’s professionally-managed primary market maker and backstop liquidator, accepting deposits from LPs who earn a share of liquidation fees and market-making profits. External parties will be eligible to create vaults, accept deposits, and charge performance fees to deploy their trading strategies across the exchange. Vault share tokens are, by default, composable in Aptos DeFi.
All user-deposited USDC is converted to usDCBL, Decibel’s default stablecoin backed 1:1 by U.S. dollars and equivalents. The stablecoin acts as user collateral for perpetual positions, while the protocol earns value on the stablecoin’s assets held in reserve, such as U.S. T-Bills. Additional types of collateralare planned for spot trading upon its launch in Q2 2026, including APT, wrapped BTC and ETH (via LayerZero), other stablecoins such as USDT, and RWAs. Aptos Labs developed Decibel in collaboration with the Decibel Foundation.
While the early rise of Perp DEXs like Hyperliquid can be pinned on a market opening following the FTX collapse and subsequent centralized exchange (CEX) failures, their viability has been proven by the performance of their onchain order books matching that of centralized venues while preserving transparency and permissionless deposit and withdrawals. Hyperliquid’s HyperCore engine processes over 200,000 orders per second with latency near 200ms, eliminating the primary objection from sophisticated traders that Perp DEXs have fundamentally inferior performance to CEXs and thus must offer favorable fees to compensate for poorer performance and unfair order execution.
In January 2026, total daily average Perp DEX volume was $32.25 billion, up 2.7x YoY from $11.84 billion in January 2025. As of Feb. 16, 2025, lifetime Perp DEX volume is more than $13.62 trillion. Perp DEXs reached 11.7% of CEX volume in November 2025, up nearly 6x from 2% a year earlier, indicating Perp DEXs are on a path to usurp centralized exchanges’ (CEXs) longstanding dominance of the perpetuals market.
In short, the long Perp DEX and short CEX thesis boils down to the idea that individuals want sovereignty over their funds and data. As such, the thesis holds that centralized exchanges that extract value by monetizing user information will continue to lose market share to Perp DEXs that align user incentives.
Why Aptos?
Aptos was designed for continuous, reliable, global value movement — a thesis that finds a natural expression in Decibel.
Aptos is among the fastest production blockchains: from Feb. 1-16, 2026, Aptos had the lowest average block time among major public blockchains at 59ms, more than six times lower than Solana. This performance coincides with expanding institutional participation via the growth of RWAs like Blackrock’s BUIDL and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI yield-bearing stablecoins, and Aptos’s stablecoin market cap recently reaching an all-time high of ~$1.9 billion.
Upcoming tech upgrades include Archon, targeting ~10ms block times, which will bring near CEX-level performance, and Block-STM V2, which scales beyond 32 cores to further improve hardware efficiency. The stack continues to evolve toward production-grade infrastructure capable of supporting real assets and applications at enterprise scale.
Predictable low fees are another reason for building on Aptos. From Feb. 1-16, 2026, Aptos’s median transaction fee was $0.00001, three times lower than the next major blockchain, Avalanche, and more than 40x lower than Solana. Other key value propositions include:
Decibel uses Aptos’ fully onchain open-source central limit order book (CLOB). This means every order, cancel, and match happens in real time transparently onchain via Aptos’ validator set, with no hidden offchain matching engine.
Aptos’s existing DeFi ecosystem provides for Decibel vault tokens to be usable in Aptos DeFi from the day they are made available.
Aptos is rolling out a native, encrypted mempool using batched threshold decryption, so validators and bots cannot see transaction details until after they are irreversibly included in a block, thereby removing the core mechanism for onchain frontrunning of Decibel trades.
Aptos’s technical strengths make it an ideal foundation for Decibel, which in turn can help expand trading activity on Aptos, as the network has roughly 10% the onchain volume of competitor Solana. Decibel will act as the hub of and provide deeper liquidity on Aptos, creating a healthier and more efficient DeFi ecosystem across all participants, such as DEXs, lending protocols, and DEX aggregators. For example, lending and borrowing protocols can route liquidations through the Decibel orderbook for better execution and deeper liquidity, reducing slippage. Additionally, DLP vault token holders could deposit DLP tokens as collateral to one of these protocols to borrow against. Ultimately, the Decibel team holds the consensus view that liquidity concentrates to a single venue that becomes de facto infrastructure, and is thus building to become that venue on Aptos, for the larger cryptoeconomy, and long-term, for all of finance.
Decibel: Fully Onchain
On trading protocols, the risk engine is used to determine which price sources are inputs to the mark price and how positions are deleveraged during periods of volatility. Many other Perp DEXs operate their risk engine at least partially offchain, introducing opacity heightened during periods of price volatility. An example of this is auto-deleveraging, the logic for which is often handled offchain, leaving traders unable to verify how positions are selected for deleveraging. Decibel’s risk engine, however, is fully onchain, meaning auto-deleveraging logic, mark price computation, and market parameterization are always verifiable.
Pre-deposits are Live
USDC pre-deposits to Decibel opened on Feb. 10 and run through Feb. 24, with participants eligible to earn Season 0 Decibel points (AMPs), USDC-denominated rewards, priority access to Mainnet Beta, and early allocation to the Decibel Liquidity Provider (DLP) vault. As of Feb. 17, 2026, more than $51.96 million had been pre-deposited by 6,193 depositors. The minimum deposit is 50 USDC, and the maximum is one million. Deposits accrue a Time-Weighted Deposit Score, whereby earlier and longer participation carries more weight than last-minute large deposits. Funds can be withdrawn at any time before Mainnet, though doing so forfeits earned points and incentives. At campaign end, on Feb. 24, committed deposits migrate into the DLP or trading balance at Mainnet launch. Users can fund their Decibel account from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or directly from a CEX.
usDCBL
On Feb. 12, the Decibel Foundation announced usDCBL, which will be Decibel's default collateral. When traders deposit USDC into Decibel, they sign an onchain transaction that converts their funds into usDCBL. In doing so, the protocol will earn value on the stablecoin’s assets held in reserve, including a mix of cash and treasuries, that it would not otherwise earn without a revenue-sharing agreement with Circle. These earnings enable Decibel to maintain lower, more flexible trading fees rather than relying on them as the primary driver of revenue.
usDCBL is issued by Bridge, a wholly owned subsidiary of payments provider Stripe, whose Open Issuance platform provides an easy onramp and offramp for users and is designed to support Genius Act-compliant dollar-denominated stablecoins. usDCBL is fully collateralized, with each token backed 1:1 by the equivalent value of U.S. dollars held in a mix of cash and treasuries managed by partners such as BlackRock and Fidelity. The Decibel Foundation has stated three ways it might direct value earned from usDCBL’s assets held in reserve:
Reinvestment into protocol development and infrastructure
Support for ecosystem growth and initiatives
Funding for future token-aligned mechanisms, such as potential programmatic buybacks.
Roadmap
Following the imminent launch of its Mainnet Beta, which will cover 12 tradeable pairs, Decibel will quickly scale up to support ~50 top crypto perp markets. In addition, a slew of feature releases are scheduled for Q1 2026, including full use of usDCBL across the exchange, support for multi-asset collateral - leading with the use of DLP LP tokens as collateral, and perps for real-world assets like equities, commodities, and ETFs. In Q2, spot trading is scheduled to launch, alongside Aptos DeFi integrations for yield opportunities. Later in 2026, a Decibel token launch is expected, along with institutional integrations.
Conclusion
Decibel is building on Aptos to become the world's most powerful and trusted exchange, driving innovation in trading and markets. USDC pre-deposits opened on Feb. 10 and run through Feb. 24, with participants eligible to earn Season 0 Decibel points, USDC-denominated rewards, priority access to Mainnet Beta, and early allocation to Decibel’s Liquidity Provider (DLP) vault. Decibel Testnet is live with Mainnet Beta imminent.
On Feb. 12, the Decibel Foundation announced usDCBL, which is designed to serve as Decibel’s default collateral asset, with USDC converted into usDCBL upon user-authorized deposits. In doing so, the protocol will earn value on the stablecoin’s assets held in reserve, such as U.S. T-Bills, that it would not otherwise earn without a revenue-sharing agreement with Circle.
The DLP is Decibel’s protocol-owned primary market maker and backstop liquidator, accepting deposits from LPs who earn a share of liquidation fees and market-making profits.
Decibel is built on Aptos, the fastest major L1 by block time, with fully onchain execution, composability, and transparency. Ultimately, the Decibel team holds the consensus view that liquidity concentrates to a single venue that becomes de facto infrastructure, and is thus building to become that venue on Aptos, for the larger cryptoeconomy, and long-term, for all of finance.
This report was commissioned by Matonee Inc. All content was produced independently by the author(s) and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Messari, Inc. or the organization that requested the report. The commissioning organization may have input on the content of the report, but Messari maintains editorial control over the final report to retain data accuracy and objectivity. Author(s) may hold cryptocurrencies named in this report. This report is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. You should conduct your own research and consult an independent financial, tax, or legal advisor before making any investment decisions. Past performance of any asset is not indicative of future results. Please see our Terms of Service for more information.
No part of this report may be (a) copied, photocopied, duplicated in any form by any means or (b) redistributed without the prior written consent of Messari®.
Matt is a Research Manager at Messari for the Protocol Reporting team. A generalist at heart, who's curious about anything and everything, and ultimately, on an adventure to find out what's true. He was an investigative reporter and multifamily/senior housing development associate before joining Messari in 2022.
Matt is a Research Manager at Messari for the Protocol Reporting team. A generalist at heart, who's curious about anything and everything, and ultimately, on an adventure to find out what's true. He was an investigative reporter and multifamily/senior housing development associate before joining Messari in 2022.
