TL;DR 2025 was the year of the engine tune-up. Velociraptr and Baby Raptr tightened blocktimes and stability under load. Zaptos reduced time-to-settlement; Block-STM v2 increases parallel execution headroom. ACTs and encrypted mempools reduce state and intent leakage, setting the network up for an endgame 2026 stack (Archon, Event-Driven Transactions, Namespaces, etc.)
Modern financial markets are built to respond in real-time. Prices update near instantly, orders clear at trillion-scale, state advances hundreds of times per second and market integrity is enforced with strict control on information flow. Most activity is automated and algo-driven, with markets responding to events autonomously.
This is the baseline. If a network wants to act as the definitive global trading infrastructure, bringing equities, derivatives, FX, and every other asset & event on-chain, it has to at least match these properties.
In 2025, the Aptos Labs research team shipped a set of proposed upgrades that moved the network meaningfully closer to that bar.
The work maps cleanly to four questions:
- How close is the network to real-time?
- How quickly does the system converge to finality?
- How native is automation?
- How protected are the user’s intents and state?
This article walks through the 2025 breakthroughs through those lenses: latencies, execution and finality, market integrity, and intent plus automation.
Latencies
We look at latency along two dimensions: how often state progresses, and how well that speed holds when activity spikes.
Two upgrades anchor this.
Velociraptr reduces the time between blocks to under 50 ms on mainnet.
It pipelines proposal and voting, allowing new blocks to be proposed optimistically while the previous one is still converging. For perp DEXs like Decibel on Aptos, this means prices, orders, and positions progress at a pace much closer to how modern electronic markets behave.
Baby Raptr ensures that this cadence holds under load. Baby Raptr is the first production step toward Raptr, Aptos’s prefix-consensus direction for BFT. Earlier designs incurred extra round trips as blocks grew larger, because transaction batches had to be fully certified before consensus could advance at full speed. Baby Raptr removes this. Leaders propose batch digests optimistically, and validators fetch and verify data as part of the voting path, so the system does not switch into a slower mode when blocks become large.
Execution and Finality
We try to answer two questions here: How quickly are the transactions applied (execution)? How quickly are the new states safe to rely on (finality)?
Zaptos reduces time-to-settlement. Instead of waiting for a block to be ordered and only then running execution and storage, Zaptos overlaps these steps under consensus. In the common case, by the time the network has agreed on the block, the transactions are already executed and committed. For users of applications like Decibel, this compresses the gap between “I submitted a trade” to “my position updated and I can move on”.
Block-STM v2 (which will be proposed for governance soon) will signal a new era for dynamic parallel execution on Aptos, with specialized throughput improvements on DeFi apps on chain.
Market integrity
Market integrity is downstream of how well the network prevents information leakage: what is your intent or what are you planning to do, and how much you hold or have moved.
Encrypted mempools protect user intent from toxic exploitation. In most chains, transactions sit in the mempool fully visible before execution, allowing validators to react to them. Encrypted mempools change that. Instead of broadcasting pending transactions to the entire network, users can submit them encrypted and revealed automatically once ordering is locked in. This reduces orderflow leakage and the basic mechanics behind front-running and sandwiching. All is information recorded on chain and transparent as usual.
Aptos Confidential Transactions (ACTs) protect amounts and balances on-chain. ACTs encrypt transaction amounts and token balances so they are confidential to the general public, while still supporting selective disclosure for authorized auditors when needed. This is completely optional, enabled by the token issuer and not the default setting.
Anticipated 2026 Aptos Improvement Proposals
2025 closed a set of core gaps. 2026 is about turning those gains into a full trading stack: faster confirmations, more execution headroom, native automation, and stronger integrity guarantees.
Aptos Labs will propose a wide set of features for governance approval next year:
- Archon will push real-time progression into the realm of CEX-level responsiveness. It is a primary–proxy leader architecture designed to give deterministic, near-instant confirmations, with targets like ~30 ms inclusion confirmations and ~10 ms block times.
- BlockSTM v2 expands the execution budget for the workloads that actually matter, making it feasible to run more complex DeFi flows without the network becoming contention-bound.
- Event-Driven Transactions will render automation native, scheduling on-chain, so contracts can react to events and time without external bots and keepers.
- Namespaces let you isolate and specialize execution for specific market structures, carving out dedicated domains for Decibel, Shelby etc. with their own operational boundaries, so high-throughput flows do not have to compete with unrelated traffic.
Our advice for 2026: Keep your notifications turned on 👀
Aptos Infrastructure in 2025: One Step Closer to the Global Trading Engine was originally published in Aptos Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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