Aptos Foundation and Labs back AI future with $50M fund

Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed more than $50 million to grow the Aptos ecosystem. 

The funding will cover first-party products, research, protocol infrastructure, and a strategic fund for trading and AI partners.

The plan centers on markets and autonomous systems that can transact at machine speed. Aptos said it is building for AI agents that can operate without human checks, using fast settlement and low-cost blockchain infrastructure.

Decibel and Shelby lead the plan

Decibel is one of the main products in the plan. It is an onchain order book and perpetuals exchange that went live on Aptos mainnet in February. Aptos said Decibel has crossed $1 billion in cumulative volume.

Shelby is the other key product. Aptos describes it as a storage protocol for data-heavy workloads, including AI agents. The network said data could become the next major agentic workload as agents license, exchange, and trade datasets.

Moreover, Aptos is moving as more crypto firms build payment rails for AI agents. Crypto.news recently reported that Coinbase launched Agentic.market, where AI agents can find services and pay with USDC through x402. That report said x402 had settled about 165 million transactions across more than 480,000 agents.

Other projects are also testing agent payments. Oobit launched Visa-backed Agent Cards that allow AI agents to spend USDT under business controls. As previously reported, Solana and Google Cloud also launched Pay.sh, which lets agents pay for API services using stablecoins.

APT gets a central role

Aptos said APT will remain tied to network use. The token is burned in transactions, used for access to advanced features, and staked to support higher performance for large workloads.

The network also said stablecoin market cap on Aptos has grown nearly tenfold since late 2024, reaching a peak of $1.93 billion. It added that real-world assets on Aptos have reached $1.2 billion, while major asset managers have already deployed on the network.

Aptos is also working on privacy features for institutional use. Recently, Aptos launched Confidential APT on April 24, adding concealed transfer data while keeping verifiability.