Aptos officially activated the Encrypted Mempool feature on its mainnet on October 12, 2026. The optional upgrade, based on AIP-144, hides transaction instruction details from validators and MEV searcher bots before a block is finalized. The move aims to cut off frontrunning and sandwich attacks, even as the APT token price slipped more than 11% in 24 hours amid broader market conditions.
Yet what sets this upgrade apart is not just the promise of privacy, but how validators execute it.
How Validators Execute Without Peeking
In a standard mempool, transaction details sit in an open queue before being recorded to a block. Bots exploit this setup to slip in orders early or sandwich traders’ orders. Under Aptos’ new system, transaction contents are encrypted from the moment they leave the user’s wallet. Validators can only see the sender’s wallet address and the gas fee bid, without knowing the asset type or the amount being sent.
Collective consensus serves as the primary safeguard. No single validator can decrypt pending transaction data alone. Decryption occurs only after a block is fully finalized and requires approval from a stake-weighted supermajority of validators. Security firm ZKSecurity audited this architecture prior to launch.
On the user side, the Petra wallet became the first to support direct encryption during the signing process, while developers can access the feature via TypeScript SDK version 7.0.0 and above. Perpetual futures exchange Decibel is also preparing to leverage the system to filter private orders.
Gas Fees Double
This added protection demands higher costs. Users who enable the feature must pay a minimum floor of 200 octas per gas unit, double the network’s standard rate, plus an additional 375 gas units for decryption costs.
The network’s time overhead remains under control. Testing across 50 nodes showed an added latency of just 20 milliseconds per block. That figure is relatively imperceptible on the Aptos network, which typically finalizes blocks in under one second.
Lessons from $29 Million in Losses on Solana
The threat of MEV bots is far from theoretical. Bitquery documented roughly 6.9 million sandwich attacks on Solana between October 2025 and October 2026 that extracted $29.7 million, with 96% targeting memecoin trades on Pump.fun.
Unlike Ethereum, which relies on Flashbots Protect, or Gnosis Chain, which uses Shutter, Aptos does not depend on an external network. The system runs directly on top of the network’s existing validator set.
For traders on Aptos, the feature offers a logical choice: paying double the extra gas is far cheaper than losing funds to sandwich bot value extraction when executing large orders.
Reported via crypto.news.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile and carry significant risk. Always do your own research (DYOR) and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
