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The Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs announced a financial commitment of more than $50 million to accelerate development of their Layer 1 ecosystem, aiming to strengthen infrastructure for institutional-grade markets and autonomous AI systems on the Aptos network.
The capital deployment will support first-party product development and a dedicated fund for trading partners and AI technology. Aptos said the initiative is designed to move toward a phase in which machines become primary participants in digital markets, addressing demand for machine-speed transactions and reducing latency barriers seen in other systems.
Decibel is highlighted as one of the pillars of the announcement. The on-chain perpetuals exchange was incubated by Aptos Labs and began operations on the mainnet in February 2026. Aptos reported that Decibel’s cumulative volume has already surpassed $1 billion, describing it as validation of the network’s ability to handle complex financial derivatives.
The teams also pointed to Shelby, a storage protocol for AI agents operating on-chain. Shelby is described as enabling datasets to be licensed for model training and traded in decentralized markets. Aptos said trading was the first agent workload to scale and that data exchange is expected to be the next critical phase of this trend.
In the first months of 2026, Aptos reported notable growth in digital assets. The capitalization of stablecoins on Aptos has nearly tenfold since the end of 2024. According to DefiLlama, the metric reached $1.93 billion in February 2026 before adjusting to $1.66 billion toward early May 2026.
The funding announcement is paired with a strategic agreement involving NETSTARS, a Japan-based QR code payment provider. The organizations are exploring multi-chain payment enablement, with NETSTARS aiming to deliver instant, cost-efficient, compliance-embedded stablecoin transactions to its merchant network through Aptos.
Under the alliance, Aptos and NETSTARS plan to collaborate on stablecoin-based payment applications for the Japanese market. The integration is expected to help expand into traditional payment sectors using regulated Web3 solutions, leveraging existing cashless payment infrastructure in the region.
Despite stablecoin growth, Aptos reported a stabilization pattern in other metrics. Total Value Locked (TVL) on the network is currently $270.8 million, below all-time highs recorded in December 2024 and May 2025, when TVL reached approximately $1.3 billion.
Aptos also cited increased fee burning, stating that 47,000 APT were removed from circulation in a single week during May, based on data from PANews.
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