The Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs have committed $50 million to Aptos development, focusing on AI agent infrastructure and research, including supporting two products launched last year to meet the growing demand for on-chain AI agent activities.
These products include Decibel, an AI-powered on-chain order book and perpetual contract exchange that launched on the Aptos mainnet in February; and Shelby, a decentralized storage protocol designed to support workloads for AI agents, the Aptos Foundation said on Thursday.
"Autonomous agents are already transacting on-chain at a frequency that no human can match, and they are being routed to the fastest, most stable, and least manipulated locations," the agency said.
Aptos joins a growing number of crypto protocols seeking opportunities in supporting the agent-based AI economy. Aptos states that there is a need to build infrastructure capable of delivering sub-second final confirmation transactions, as well as systems that operate "24/7 without requiring manual upgrades."
AI agents can act as personal assistants in home and work settings, performing daily tasks on people's behalf, whether it's booking flights, shopping, or executing high-level on-chain transactions.
Aptos ecosystem's "full-stack" plan for both the market and machines. Aptos Network
Last month, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong predicted that "soon the number of AI agents trading online will surpass that of humans," echoing Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire's comments in January that within three to five years, "literally billions of AI agents" will be trading on-chain.
The World Economic Forum also anticipates a market boom, predicting in January that the AI agent market will reach $236 billion by 2034, a 43-fold increase from $5.4 billion in 2024.
AI agents use blue-chip stablecoins for transactions.
On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services announced that it has integrated Coinbase's x402 payment protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling the AI agent to make USDC (USDC) payments and access the payment control service hosted by AWS.
A week ago, crypto wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-backed virtual card that allows AI agents to make online purchases on behalf of businesses using USDt (USDT).
The foundation stated that Aptos (APT) tokens will play a central role in the AI agent economy of the ecosystem, including being burned in transactions, serving as a prerequisite for accessing advanced AI agent features, and improving performance through staking.
The foundation stated that the $50 million will also be used to develop other aspects of the "Aptos technology stack," including integrations with new banks, institutional platforms, and wallet providers.
Aptos stated that it also plans to advance the development of encrypted mempools and provide features such as confidential perpetual contract trading.
Aptos launched its privacy-oriented token last month.
Meanwhile, Aptos launched a privacy-oriented token, Confidential APT, on the Aptos mainnet on April 24, as part of addressing the long-standing trade-off between user privacy protection and compliance transparency.
Sherry Xiao, founding engineer at Aptos Labs, told Cointelegraph that the Confidential APT can help companies hide on-chain employee salaries, as well as cover vault flows, settlement flows, and trading strategies—information that could otherwise be seen by competitors.
