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Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed $50 million to Aptos development, with a particular focus on AI agent infrastructure and research, including support for two products it shipped last year to meet rising demand for onchain AI agent activity.
Those products include Decibel, an AI-powered onchain order book and perpetuals exchange that launched on the Aptos mainnet in February, and Shelby, a decentralized storage protocol that seeks to support the workloads of AI agents, the Aptos Foundation said on Thursday.
“Autonomous agents are already transacting onchain at frequencies no human can match, routing to whatever venue is fastest, most consistent, and least gameable,” it said.
Aptos joins a growing number of crypto protocols seeking opportunities in supporting the agentic AI economy. Aptos said there is a need to build infrastructure that offers sub-second finality and systems that “run 24/7 with no human to escalate to.”
AI agents can act as personal assistants for people, both at home and in the workplace, completing everyday tasks on their behalf, whether it be booking a flight, making a shopping purchase or executing a high-level trade onchain.
Last month, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong predicted there will be “more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon,” echoing comments from Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire in January that “literally billions of AI agents” will be transacting onchain in three to five years.
The World Economic Forum is expecting a boom too, having predicted in January that AI agents could become a $236 billion market by 2034, a 43-fold rise from its $5.4 billion market size in 2024.
AI agents use blue-chip stablecoins to transact
On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services said it integrated Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to allow AI agents to make USDC (USDC) payments and access services through AWS-managed payment controls.
A week earlier, crypto wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-supported virtual card for AI agents to make online purchases in USDt (USDT) on behalf of businesses.
The foundation said the Aptos (APT) token would play a central role in the ecosystem’s AI agent economy by being burned in transactions, required to access advanced AI agent features, and staked to improve performance.
Related: How AI agents can reshape arbitrage in prediction markets
The foundation said the $50 million would also be used to develop other aspects of the “Aptos stack,” which also includes integrations with neobanks, institutional platforms and wallet providers.
Aptos said it also plans to work on building encrypted mempools and offer confidential perps trading, among other things.
Aptos rolled out privacy-focused coin last month
Meanwhile, Aptos launched a privacy-focused coin — Confidential APT — on Aptos mainnet on April 24 as part of an effort to fix a long-standing trade-off between protecting user privacy and preserving transparency for compliance.
Aptos Labs founding engineer Sherry Xiao, told Cointelegraph that Confidential APT could help businesses hide the salaries of employees who are paid onchain, as well as conceal treasury movements, settlement flows and trading strategies that competitors could otherwise see.
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