Aptos Activates Optional Encrypted Mempool on Mainnet

Overview

• Aptos announced and turned on the Encrypted Mempool on Monday, October 12, letting users opt in per transaction to keep pending transaction details hidden until blocks are decrypted and executed.
• A compatible wallet encrypts the transaction payload on the user’s device, validators agree on an order without seeing payloads, and decryption requires combining threshold shares from a stake-weighted majority of validators.
• The protection does not hide sender addresses or gas fees and carries concrete costs: a minimum gas price of 200 octas per unit, an extra 375 gas units per encrypted transaction for decryption, and about 20 milliseconds of added latency in 50-node tests.
• An independent four-week audit by zkSecurity flagged seven high-severity issues including forgeable range proofs, replayable key-generation transcripts, and a validator-crash bug that were largely patched, and the design depends on an honest validator majority plus a trusted-setup reference string.
• Early integrations are under way with Petra adding signing encryption and Decibel planning private pending orders, and near-term adoption rates, bot adaptation to public metadata, and comparisons with Ethereum’s private-builder model and Solana’s TEE-based engines will determine if this approach spreads.