thedefiant.io
26 February 2026 23:06, UTC
Decibel, a perpetual derivatives decentralized exchange (DEX) incubated by Aptos Labs, launched its mainnet today alongside its official points program.
The DEX is starting with perpetual markets, before expanding to spot and real-world assets (RWAs), similar to the progression taken by market leaders Hyperliquid and Lighter.
According to a press release shared with The Defiant, Decibel’s testnet generated “over 1 million user trades per day” across more than 130,000 daily active users (DAU).
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So far, the DEX has processed $6.4 million in volume since its mainnet launch and hosts $57 million in total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama.
The DEX is based on a central limit order book (CLOB) model, and hosts its risk engine onchain, ensuring functions such as auto-deleveraging are directly verifiable via the block explorer.
While Aptos Labs incubated Decibel and the DEX is built on the Aptos Layer 1, the DEX also uses X-chain accounts to enable deposits from Ethereum and Solana.
The perpetual market remains red hot, with more than $730 billion traded across all DEXs in February, roughly the same amount traded throughout all of 2023. Activity has cooled off since volumes peaked at $1.37 trillion in October, but the sector remains one of the most popular in DeFi.
Brylee Whatley, the Head of the Decibel Foundation, told The Defiant, “On the acquisition side, Decibel has invested heavily in aligning incentives with real usage. Season 1 of our Amps points program is live and is designed to reward genuine trading activity. But incentives only get users through the door.”
“What keeps traders is trust in the system they are trading on. Everything on Decibel is transparent - the infrastructure, risk approach and liquidation logic. We built an exchange where serious traders feel confident deploying real capital,” they added.
While a majority of DEXs offer tokenized equity and commodity offerings, only HyperUnit’s TradeXYZ, Lighter’s tokenized Korean stocks, and Ostium have found sustained liquidity and success.
Whatley also touched on the future vision for Decibel as it enters the highly competitive tokenized RWA trading space, citing Aptos’ existing success in the world of RWAs and the chain’s global go-to-market reach.
“Imagine using tokenized RWA holdings - treasuries, equities, commodities - as collateral to trade perpetuals, or using your crypto portfolio to margin equity positions. That kind of cross-asset capital efficiency is impossible at a traditional brokerage and isn't available on other DEXs,” Whatley concluded.
