Aptos beats Ethereum to a built-in encrypted mempool as four-year vesting ends
- Aptos switched on an optional, protocol-native encrypted mempool on October 12, hiding transaction payloads until a block is finalized.
- Ethereum’s equivalent proposals (EIP-8184 and EIP-8288) are still unbuilt.
- The launch coincided with the end of Aptos’s four-year insider vesting, which cuts monthly APT unlocks by about 60%.
Aptos has turned on an optional encrypted mempool on its mainnet, letting users hide a transaction’s contents until a block is finalized.
The feature is expected to defend against front-running, and it went live on the same day that the Aptos network’s four-year token unlock schedule came to an end.
What feature did Aptos switch on?
Aptos has added an optional encrypted mempool to its network, and it’s aimed at traders. Users can now hide which function their transaction calls and what inputs it uses.
The feature comes from Aptos Improvement Proposal 144 (AIP-144), written by Aptos Labs cryptographer Rex Fernando. It works by locking those details with a key that the validators create together.
A fresh one is created for each round of the network’s operation. The locked transaction goes into the mempool and is only unlocked right before it runs. The sender’s address and the fees remain visible.
Aptos is making use of a batch approach in order to keep costs low. It allows validators to take one small, fixed-size step to unlock all the sealed transactions in a block, no matter how many there are. AIP-144 says that’s enough to support more than 1,000 transactions per second at launch.
Aptos ran a test with 50 nodes on its real consensus system and found that each block took about 20 milliseconds longer, but still finished in under a second.
A research paper called “TrX” supports the feature and has been submitted to a major security conference, the ACM CCS. It measured a 27-millisecond delay from proposal to execution, around 14% slower than normal.
Will Ethereum switch on the same feature?
Ethereum has also been working on a feature to reduce maximal extractable value (MEV), but its versions are still only proposals. The Encrypt the Mempool Coalition, led by Shutter Network and joined by Fairblock and Nillion, is backing EIP-8184, also called LUCID.
It’s a design that was drafted in March 2026 by Anders Elowsson, Justin Florentine and Julian Ma and lets users commit to a transaction first and reveal it later.
Separately, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a recursive STARK mempool in EIP-8288 in September.
Petra is the first wallet to build the Aptos option into its signing process. Decibel, a perpetuals exchange, is a planned user. The TypeScript SDK has supported the option since version 7.0.0, so developers can use it too.
Notably, Aptos switched on the feature just as it hit a milestone in APT’s supply schedule. The genesis unlock for core contributors and early backers ran for exactly four years from the October 2022 mainnet launch and concluded on October 12, 2026, Aptos said on X, leaving no genesis insider tokens left to vest.
Cryptopolitan reported earlier this month that Aptos is cutting the monthly release of new APT tokens by about 60%, from 11.31 million to 4.54 million. The other 4.54 million will go to the Community and Foundation pools through 2032.
Staking rewards, which are now up to 2.6% a year, will become the main source of new APT, adding about 19.8 million tokens annually. As of September 30, there were 871.02 million APT in circulation.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.
FAQs
What does the Aptos encrypted mempool actually hide?
It encrypts the transaction's payload, the function being called and its arguments, until the block is finalized and decrypted just before execution. Sender addresses and fees stay visible, so it offers pre-execution confidentiality rather than permanent anonymity.
Does Aptos rely on a separate committee to decrypt transactions?
No. Decryption is handled by the existing validator set through a stake-weighted threshold, the same one used to reach consensus, so no single validator can open a pending transaction and no outside committee is involved.
When did Aptos's four-year token vesting end and what changes?
The genesis unlock for core contributors and early backers concluded on October 12, 2026. According to Cryptopolitan, scheduled monthly APT releases drop about 60%, from 11.31 million to 4.54 million tokens, with staking rewards at 2.6% a year becoming the main source of new supply.
Disclaimer. The information provided is not trading advice. Cryptopolitan.com holds no liability for any investments made based on the information provided on this page. We strongly recommend independent research and/or consultation with a qualified professional before making any investment decisions.
Hannah Collymore
Hannah is a writer and editor with nearly a decade of blog writing and event reporting experience in the crypto space. At Cryptopolitan, Hannah contributes to the news page, reporting and analyzing the latest developments in DeFi, RWA, crypto regulation, AI and frontier tech industries. She graduated from Arcadia university with a degree in Business Administration.
