Decibel Launches on Aptos: $58 Million, Stripe’s Secret Weapon, and a Lot of Noise

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Finance

What you should know (and probably don’t):

  • Decibel: 700,000 accounts, 132,000 daily users, and over 1 million daily trades. Yeah, they’re not messing around.
  • Everything happens onchain. Order matching, settlement, margin logic-totally on the blockchain, no surprise there.
  • Over $50 million invested before it even launched. Guess some people are feeling pretty confident about this one.

So, Decibel-remember them? The onchain perpetuals exchange that’s been incubated by Aptos Labs, is officially live on the Aptos mainnet. And, of course, this announcement is making waves. Like a tidal wave, but one with way more blockchain and way less water.

During its testnet, Decibel managed to snag 700,000 unique accounts. Over 132,000 of them were “active” every single day, trading more than 1 million times a day. Wow, really? One million trades a day? Do these people not have jobs?

And the cherry on top? They raised over $58 million in pre-deposits before the mainnet even saw the light of day. Seriously, you have to admire that kind of boldness-or sheer audacity. At least 40% of that came from Ethereum and Solana users, so there’s that. Must be nice, huh?

But wait, there’s more! The perpetual exchanges battle is heating up, and Decibel is now entering the fray with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Hyperliquid is still on top, holding onto its dominance in volume, but Decibel wants in on that sweet, sweet $920 billion trading volume that’s been going down in the last 30 days. The competition is fierce, but hey, Decibel’s got a whole bunch of capital and a decent shot at making some noise.

Decibel isn’t just another exchange with flashy promises. It runs a central limit order book where everything-yes, everything-happens onchain. No more sneaky offchain risk engines or random human decisions. Just cold, hard smart contracts. They’re pretty transparent about it too, which is rare in this business. No secret agendas here, folks.

The platform also plans to become the first perpetual exchange built on Aptos, a layer-1 blockchain with impressive block times and finality speeds. This isn’t your grandma’s blockchain-this one’s fast. Real fast.

Now, let’s talk funding. Users can top off their accounts with Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or even from centralized exchanges. And, get this: 40% of their pre-deposit capital came from Ethereum and Solana. So, Decibel’s basically saying, “Look, we’re going big or going home,” and it looks like they’re going big.

Oh, and the collateral? They’ve got this shiny new stablecoin-usDCBL. It’s backed by Bridge, a Stripe company. Of course, they’re using a stablecoin, because nothing says “serious financial instrument” like a coin that doesn’t fluctuate. Brilliant, right?

But wait, Decibel has bigger plans. They’re not stopping at crypto derivatives. They want to add spot markets, multi-collateral accounts, and even tokenized real-world assets. Because why not throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?

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2026-02-26 17:02