Aptos Proposes Encrypted Mempool to Prevent Frontrunning

Aptos Labs has proposed an encrypted mempool designed to hide pending trade instructions until transaction ordering is complete. According to CryptoNews, tests conducted by the network's research team reported 27 milliseconds of added proposal-to-execution latency, representing a 14% increase compared with the baseline system.

The proposed feature aims to protect pending orders while keeping completed transactions public onchain. Under the design outlined by researchers Rex Fernando, Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Andrei Tonkikh, and Zhuolun Xiang in a November 2025 preprint paper, validators share decryption control during each epoch based on a stake-based threshold.

Governance Approval Required

Aptos Labs stated that the implementation of the encrypted mempool is conditional upon governance approval. If approved, the network claims it would become the first layer-1 protocol to offer native encrypted mempool protection at the protocol level, reducing orderflow leakage and frontrunning for large onchain transactions without requiring a separate confidentiality service.

The technical design utilizes batched decryption to limit the processing burden on validators. By processing batches together, much of the computation occurs while validators vote, leaving the remaining online phase at less than 20 milliseconds per batch.

Key facts

• Aptos Labs proposed an encrypted mempool to hide pending trade instructions until transaction ordering is finalized.
• Research tests recorded 27 milliseconds of added proposal-to-execution latency, equivalent to 14% over baseline.
• Validators share decryption key control during each epoch using a stake-based threshold.
• The deployment of the native encrypted mempool remains conditional upon network governance approval.