Aptos Labs is moving forward with its encrypted mempool proposal through the governance process, with Proposal #206 enabling ChunkyDKG V1 and encrypted transactions currently under voting. The on-chain governance vote was reported on October 5 with voting scheduled to end on October 6, representing a genuine protocol change to address MEV anxiety and provide privacy-focused anti-front-running capabilities. According to the company's October 30, 2025 blog post, the proposed feature would hide pending trade instructions until transaction ordering is complete, with its research team reporting 27 milliseconds of added proposal-to-execution latency in tests.
Researchers from Aptos Labs, including Rex Fernando, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Andrei Tonkikh and Zhuolun Xiang, describe the system in their November 2025 research paper as adding 27 milliseconds to proposal-to-execution latency, equivalent to 14% over the baseline used in their comparison. The technical design involves validators sharing control of decryption keys during each epoch, with a stake-based threshold required to reveal encrypted payloads. The company reports that processing batches together reduces workload compared to decrypting each transaction separately, with the remaining online phase at less than 20 milliseconds per batch. Aptos' AIP-144 targets frontrunning and sandwich attacks and outlines a launch capacity above 1,000 TPS for the encrypted mempool design.
According to Aptos Labs, pending transactions on most blockchains expose information that validators and other participants can use to copy trades, change their order or trade ahead of users. The company's original announcement made its first-of-its-kind claim conditional: "If approved by governance, Aptos will be the first L1 to offer users the option to send transactions via a native Encrypted Mempool." The system is designed to reduce orderflow leakage, censorship and frontrunning for large onchain transactions, providing protocol-level protection rather than relying on separate services for order confidentiality.
In May 2026, Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs committed more than $50 million to first-party products, research, protocol infrastructure and a strategic fund for trading and AI partners. According to the funding announcement, Decibel went live on Aptos mainnet in February as an onchain order book and perpetual futures exchange, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion by May. The network reported that its stablecoin market capitalization had reached a peak of $1.93 billion, nearly ten times its level in late 2024, while real-world assets had reached $1.2 billion.
Recent developments show growing institutional interest in Aptos-based solutions. In April 2025, DigiShares disclosed its Aptos tokenization integration, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Ondo Finance among firms already using Aptos for tokenization. More recently, Aug. 13 reporting covered Franklin's BENJI custody arrangement following an SEC staff no-action letter permitting specified custody arrangements for Franklin's U.S.-registered funds investing in its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. The SEC letter identified Stellar as the primary blockchain with other networks available for certain eligible accounts, while requiring annual board reviews and independent accountant verification.
