Decibel Trade switches on Aptos’ Encrypted Mempool to shield trader orders

Decibel Trade has turned on Aptos’ Encrypted Mempool. Traders on the onchain exchange can now hide the details of their orders while those transactions are still pending. How the Encrypted Mempool works Think of a mempool as a public waiting room. Transactions sit there before validators bundle them into a block, and anyone watching can see who is in line and what they plan to do. That visibility is the problem. Bots scan the waiting room, spot a large buy, and slip their own trades in before and after it. These tactics are called frontrunning and sandwich attacks, and the trader on the receiving end pays for them through worse prices. The feature went live on Decibel Trade on October 21, 2026. It lets users encrypt their order payloads on their own device, client-side, before the order ever travels to the blockchain. Not everything is hidden. The sender address and gas fee stay visible. What disappears from view is the substance of the trade: the function being called and the inputs fed into it. Validators cannot read those specifics until the trade is finalized. The Aptos plumbing behind it The capability became possible after Aptos activated governance proposal AIP-144, which wa...