Aptos Ships Encrypted Mempool on Mainnet With 20ms Latency Cost

Encrypted Mempool Ships on Mainnet

Encrypted Mempool shipped on Aptos mainnet on October 12, and the feature is opt-in, one transaction at a time. A compatible wallet encrypts the contents of a transaction on the user's device before it reaches the network, so neither validators nor outside observers can read the instructions while the transaction waits for ordering. Once a block is finalized, validators combine their decryption shares, reveal the payloads and execute them. The sender's wallet address and the network fee stay public throughout; the function called, its inputs, the assets and the amounts do not. The launch was announced in an official Aptos (APT) post, which framed the feature as protection against frontrunning, sandwich attacks and other forms of maximal extractable value (MEV). The design is specified in AIP-144, the network's technical proposal for encrypted transaction processing, and it reuses infrastructure Aptos already runs: the validators that order transactions are the same validators that decrypt them, with no external committee and no private transaction builder. Aptos states that no single validator can decrypt a pending transaction on its own; the model requires a stake-weighted validator majority, the same security assumption behind the chain's existing consensus. The measured cost is small. In tests across 50 nodes, the network recorded roughly 20 milliseconds of added latency per block, benchmarked against the production AptosBFT implementation, which normally finalizes blocks in under one second. Encrypted transactions face a minimum gas price that doubles to 200 octas per gas unit, and each one adds 375 gas units for payload decryption on top of its execution costs. ZKSecurity completed an independent security review before launch, and existing Move smart contracts require no modification to support encrypted calls.

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6.9 Million Sandwich Attacks on Solana

The MEV problem the feature targets is documented at scale on other chains. Analytics firm Bitquery traced about 6.9 million sandwich attacks on Solana in the window from October 30, 2025 to October 7, 2026, run by 2,545 bot wallets against roughly 2.2 million wallets, extracting $29.7 million before trading costs. Around 96% of the attacks involved memecoins traded through Pump.fun-related markets, and daily attacks rose from a late-2025 pace near 3,400 to 51,900 by September 2026. The research covered Solana and did not establish equivalent losses on Aptos (APT), but it describes the playbook: bots monitor pending transactions, trade ahead of a large order and sell into the resulting price move. Aptos put the warning more bluntly to its users: bots use chain visibility to trade against you or to copy a strategy. Other networks picked different defenses. Ethereum's Flashbots Protect routes transactions through private infrastructure, while Gnosis Chain runs Shutter's encrypted mempool technology. Aptos differs in that its existing validator set handles both ordering and decryption. On tooling, encryption support ships with version 7.0.0 and later of the TypeScript software development kit, and Petra is the first wallet to offer encryption directly inside its signing flow. Decibel, a perpetual futures exchange built on Aptos, plans to use encrypted transactions for private pending orders. The market did not reward the release. CoinGecko data showed Aptos (APT) at $0.7995, down 11.5% over 24 hours at the time of the check, inside a $0.7974 to $0.9135 range on volume near $98.91 million, with market capitalization about $697.14 million. Supply-side pressure framed the week: 11.31 million APT worth $9.06 million entered circulation in the October 11 token unlock, and vesting schedules ending October 12 cut monthly releases 60% to 4.54 million APT. Our live monitoring now puts the 24-hour loss closer to 7%; readers tracking the recovery can follow our APT technical analysis.

The AIP-144 Trade-Off

The AIP-144 specification makes the trade-off explicit: doubled minimum gas and a 375-unit decryption charge per encrypted transaction, paid to keep intent hidden until block finalization. For institutional order flow, and for venues like Decibel that route size through pending orders, that is a deliberate price on information leakage. Our earlier read of the Encrypted Mempool proposal carried a 27ms latency estimate; the shipped implementation measured 20ms across 50 nodes, so overhead landed below plan. What runs now that did not run before: three opt-in layers on mainnet, Keyless Accounts for identity, Confidential APT for transfer amounts and Encrypted Mempool for transaction intent.