We’re back with another edition of Move the Mic, where we spotlight builders pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on Aptos. This time, we sat down with the team behind Decibel, an onchain trading engine aiming to unify spot, perps, and programmable liquidity in one powerful system. From early beginnings to a vision of shaping the future of Aptos DeFi, here’s everything you need to know about Decibel.
Neşe: Can you tell us about your project and its main objectives within the Aptos ecosystem?
Decibel: Decibel is a fully onchain trading engine built to unify spot, perpetuals, and programmable liquidity in one composable system. Incubated by Aptos Labs, Decibel delivers capital efficiency, transparency, and performance—without sacrificing self-custody or speed.
Our goal is to serve as the execution layer of the Aptos DeFi stack and a foundational pillar of the Global Trading Engine vision. We aim to bring liquidity, velocity, and institutional-grade trading infrastructure to the world’s financial markets—onchain.
Neşe: What’s one thing about your project that you think would surprise people who aren’t familiar with it?
Decibel: Most people assume DeFi comes with trade-offs: performance vs. transparency, speed vs. composability. Decibel challenges that assumption.
Every trade on Decibel is matched, routed, and settled entirely onchain—with millisecond latency. There’s no hidden matching engine, no centralized backend, and no black-box execution. What you see is what happens.
Neşe: If your project were an animal, what would it be and why?
Decibel: We’ll leave that to your imagination, but it would be something fast, stealthy, and powerful, but still part of a greater ecosystem.
Decibel isn’t here to make noise for the sake of it. It’s precise, intelligent, and built to move quickly while remaining grounded in strong principles and infrastructure.
Neşe: What’s the funniest or most unexpected thing that’s happened during your development process?
Decibel: Bloopers include launching DevNet with the password still on our docs site and no metadata associated with our URL, so we had to scramble the morning of the launch to get that updated (go, Kent!). Most unexpected was probably when the community decided the logo looked like a dog’s face and started making Decibel Dog memes within the first few days - we loved that!
Neşe: What was the inspiration or story behind choosing the name Decibel?
Decibel: We couldn’t be more excited about our brand - the sound and volume references of Decibel have been a lot of fun for us to play with - but the origin story is definitely a good one. We are named after a legendary NYC bar called Sake Bar Decibel (read more here). The early team was trying (unsuccessfully to this point) to come up with a name when one of us was on the way to meet friends at this bar and realized that Decibel was in fact a pretty sick name for a DEX. Fast forward a few months, and we returned to the bar for our first all-team happy hour. Needless to say, the staff had no idea what a DEX was.
Neşe: What will the “first day” experience look like for a trader starting to use Decibel?
Decibel: Decibel has a big vision, and we’re going to be adding incredible product features throughout our planned roadmap, but our day 1 launch, we are prioritizing a pro-level perps trading experience. You can expect an advanced trading interface for perps, low fees, points program, referral benefits, a variety of crypto markets, vaults (with the ability to deposit into the protocol vault for market making and liquidation exposure, as well as user contributed vaults), multicollateral and cross margin positions, builder codes, and more. We are hopeful that the combination of these features will result in deep liquidity and highly efficient markets for our traders.
Neşe: The idea of using on-chain features together with CEX-level speed is very interesting. From a technical perspective, how are you working to achieve these goals?
Decibel: Decibel is built natively on Aptos and leverages its unique parallel execution engine, high throughput, and sub-second finality.
By integrating directly with Aptos-native modules and the Aptos Orderbook, we’re able to support 100% onchain matching and settlement without introducing performance bottlenecks.
In addition, Decibel is building a highly optimized trading VM, deeply integrated with Aptos’ Block-STM architecture and core infrastructure upgrades like Raptr and Zaptos. Together, these advancements, among others coming soon, pave the way toward:
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Sub-20ms block times
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Over 1 million orders per second
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CEX-level speed, without centralized risk
Neşe: What are your future plans?
Decibel: We’re just getting started.
Following our Devnet launch, we’re targeting Testnet in Q4 2025 and Mainnet in Q1 2026. Each phase will introduce new features, functionality, and fun and exciting opportunities for the community to get involved.
All of this is in service of one goal: making Decibel the execution engine for onchain markets—on Aptos and beyond.
You can see our full roadmap at https://decibel.trade/.
Stay tuned as Decibel continues to build the execution engine for onchain markets on Aptos and beyond.
Follow Decibel on social media to keep up with their latest updates, and don’t forget to stay tuned for more Move the Mic interviews as we spotlight the builders shaping the future of Aptos.