Aptos Labs has proposed an encrypted mempool that would hide pending trade instructions until validators finish ordering them, aiming to curb frontrunning and other extractable-value exploits. The design remains conditional on governance approval, and researchers report it adds 27 milliseconds of latency per transaction. The proposal sits alongside Aptos' broader push into onchain trading, including the Decibel exchange and more than $50 million in ecosystem funding.
Aptos Labs wants validators to stop seeing the contents of pending trades before they execute. The company's Oct. 30, 2025 blog post outlined a proposal for an optional encrypted mempool that submits transactions without exposing their details while validators decide the order in which they execute.
Encrypted orders would stay hidden until execution
Pending transactions on most blockchains let validators and other participants copy trades, reorder them or trade ahead of users, according to Aptos Labs. Under the design, validators would reveal the encrypted instructions only after ordering is locked in, so transactions can still execute, while completed transaction details would remain recorded onchain as usual.
Aptos Labs said if approved by governance, it would become the first L1 to offer a native encrypted mempool — a claim the company itself ties to that governance vote, not a settled fact.
Batching cuts the cost of decryption
During each epoch, the period when the validator set stays fixed, validators share control of the decryption key, and a stake-based threshold must cooperate to reveal encrypted payloads, according to the blog. Processing transactions as a batch cuts the computational work compared with decrypting each one separately, since most of it happens while validators vote, and the company puts the remaining online phase at under 20 milliseconds per batch.
A subsequent research paper on TrX, by Rex Fernando, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Andrei Tonkikh and Zhuolun Xiang, integrates encrypted mempools with a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol. Published as a November 2025 preprint, it identifies visible transaction contents before ordering as the mechanism behind frontrunning, sandwich trades and other forms of MEV. The authors report 27 milliseconds of added proposal-to-execution latency, 14% over their baseline, calling the result performance comparable with leading consensus designs while providing protection against MEV.
The proposal sits inside a $50 million trading push
Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed more than $50 million to first-party products, research, protocol infrastructure and a fund for trading and AI partners. Decibel, an onchain order book and perpetual futures exchange that went live on Aptos mainnet in February, had recorded cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion by May.
The network also reported its stablecoin market capitalization reached a peak of $1.93 billion, nearly ten times its level in late 2024.
Source: crypto.news
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