Aptos Pledges $50M for On-Chain AI Agent Infrastructure

Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs announced a $50 million commitment to develop on-chain infrastructure for AI agents, with funds aimed at engineering, research and ecosystem integrations. The funding will support Decibel, an AI-driven on-chain order book and perpetuals exchange, and Shelby, a decentralized storage protocol for agent workloads.

The announcement, released Thursday, said the work will target improvements across the Aptos stack, including upgrades to achieve sub-second finality and services that run continuously without human escalation. The foundation wrote that autonomous agents are already transacting on-chain at frequencies no human can match and that networks must adapt to those speeds.

Decibel launched on the Aptos mainnet in February and offers an AI-powered order book and perpetuals market designed for high-frequency, machine-driven trading. Shelby is intended to provide decentralized storage tailored to the compute and data needs of persistent agents.

Aptos outlined several technical priorities for the funding. Engineers will research encrypted mempools and confidential perpetuals trading to reduce front-running and protect trading strategies. The foundation also plans continued work on Confidential APT, a privacy-focused coin it launched on mainnet on April 24 to provide greater transaction privacy while preserving compliance options.

The foundation described the APT token’s role in the agent economy: certain transactions will burn APT, advanced agent features will require APT access, and staking APT can be used to improve network performance. The $50 million will also finance integrations with neobanks, institutional platforms and wallet providers to expand where agents can operate and how they can settle transactions.

The Aptos announcement placed the funding in the context of broader industry developments. Amazon Web Services recently added a payments protocol to its agent platform to allow agents to make controlled USDC payments, and a crypto wallet startup introduced a Visa-backed virtual card that enables agents to make purchases in USDt on behalf of businesses. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has predicted more AI agents will transact online than humans in the near term, and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire forecast billions of on-chain agents within three to five years. The World Economic Forum has estimated the AI agent market could grow from about $5.4 billion in 2024 to roughly $236 billion by 2034.

Sherry Xiao, a founding engineer at Aptos Labs, noted that Confidential APT could help businesses conceal on-chain salary payments, treasury movements and settlement flows from competitors. Aptos said the $50 million will be allocated across product development, research and ecosystem partnerships to scale continuous, automated activity on its network while addressing privacy and settlement speed.