On the evening of June 24, Aptos announced the launch of a new storage protocol called Shelby in collaboration with crypto giant Jump Crypto. This marks Jump Crypto’s first major move since returning to the crypto space with a post on June 19. As soon as the news broke, the market reacted swiftly — APT surged by 30%, rising from 4.2 USDT to a high of 5.13 USDT, marking its best performance in recent times.

Jump Crypto previously participated in Aptos Labs’ $150 million Series A funding round in 2022, known for its “pooling” capabilities and engineering prowess. For instance, Jump is a major contributor to Solana’s highly anticipated validator client, Firedancer. As the first high-profile project since Jump’s return, Shelby has brought attention back to Aptos and created an “imaginative space” for ecological synergy and renewed prosperity.

But there are also doubts. Sui was the first to launch the storage protocol Walrus; is Aptos’s move a copy of its competitor’s strategy? Let’s take a deeper look at Shelby.

Shelby, “Hot Storage Protocol”

From Cold to Hot: The Change in the Web3 Storage Paradigm

In the narrative of Web3 infrastructure, decentralized storage has always been an unavoidable topic. However, for a long time, this field has been dominated by “cold storage”: suitable for storing low-frequency access, long-term preserved data, such as NFT metadata, backups, etc. Typical representatives include Filecoin, Arweave, etc., which emphasize persistence and cost optimization, but may not be suitable for high-frequency, real-time scenarios.

Shelby is a “hot storage” solution proposed to address this pain point.

According to the official definition, Shelby is the first “cloud-grade infrastructure” in the Web3 world, featuring sub-second read times, a native incentive mechanism, and chain-agnostic compatibility. It not only allows data to be stored but also makes data flowable, usable, and monetizable, serving a wide range of Web3 application scenarios that demand high real-time performance, including video streaming, AI outputs, dynamic NFTs, and gaming assets.

Currently, Shelby uses Aptos as its preferred settlement layer, leveraging its 600 milliseconds finality, 30,000 TPS, and ultra-low gas fees to coordinate real-time data streams. Shelby will launch the developer testnet in Q4 2025.

Avery Ching, CEO of Aptos Labs, pointed out in a personal article: “The exchange of Web3 assets can now be done in seconds, but the data is still in a static and unusable state. What Shelby aims to solve is this key bottleneck.”

Backed by Jump, Shelby is not just a simple “fast.”

If Aptos is known for its high concurrency and high throughput, then Jump Crypto is a veteran in high-frequency trading and real-time systems. The reason Shelby dares to call itself “hot storage” lies in the characteristics of its underlying architecture:

• High-speed synchronization supported by a dedicated optical fiber backbone network for global nodes.
• Ensure content localization and achieve read speeds as fast as sub-second through the edge caching system.
• Adopt the Clay code redundancy mechanism to reduce replication costs while ensuring repair efficiency;
• The native support for a pay-per-use reading mechanism in the crypto space is based on a usage-based monetization logic.
• Support smart contract definition access control and DRM, providing one-stop processing from data distribution to copyright protection.

This design is not just about creating a faster IPFS (the most well-known decentralized storage network), but rather trying to merge the performance standards of Web2 with the decentralized principles of Web3, to create a programmable, monetizable, and scalable data circulation network.

Top-tier projects are settling in, and the community discussions are lively.

APT price surged by about 30%. In addition to the backing from Jump Crypto, it is also due to the impressive lineup of ecological projects brought together by Shelby—Metaplex, Story Protocol, DoubleZero, etc. These are not only the most active data-intensive applications in the industry but also represent the exploration of Web3 data usage value across various chains.

Metaplex is rooted in Solana, and DoubleZero was founded by Austin Federa, the former strategy head of Solana. The Solana ecosystem projects that Jump is deeply involved with are also participating in the Aptos ecosystem construction. Does this indicate that there is indeed “something behind Shelby” that has gained recognition from everyone?

The community’s interpretation of Shelby is also exceptionally positive.

Some compare it to the Walrus Protocol, pointing out that the purposes of their services are vastly different: Walrus leans towards cold storage and archiving, while Shelby is aimed at real-time usage and profit distribution; the former relies on low-frequency access and audit incentive mechanisms, whereas the latter transforms each data read into a payment action, fundamentally incentivizing the improvement of data readability.

Moreover, some viewpoints suggest that Shelby’s crypto + pay-per-read mechanism provides a paradigm breakthrough for the long-standing “read incentive” problem in the field of Data Availability. Compared to projects like Celestia and Walrus, which still rely on external funding subsidies to maintain their services, Shelby directly incorporates user behavior into the economic loop, encouraging nodes to actively maintain data availability.

A Higher Vision: More Than Just a Comeback for Aptos

Shelby’s release is certainly an important move for Aptos in seeking ecological breakthroughs, but its broader significance may lie in the fact that it attempts to deeply integrate content economy, creator economy, and on-chain infrastructure with the concept of “data as a native asset” for the first time. This not only serves Aptos itself but also radiates to the entire multi-chain world through its “chain-agnostic” feature.

Aptos Labs repeatedly emphasized the composability and cross-chain capabilities of Shelby in its announcement: whether you are deploying dynamic NFTs on Solana or building RAG models on Ethereum Layer 2, Shelby can achieve rapid integration and yield linkage through standardized interfaces. In the future, it will also expand to on-chain environments such as Cosmos and Modular Stack.

Combining Aptos’s existing Global Trading Engine for value transfer, Shelby complements the capability of value generation: the former allows assets to flow freely, while the latter makes content itself an asset with measurable value. The two complement each other, and Aptos is attempting to create an on-chain economic closed loop.

In conclusion: the possibilities and challenges of a comeback.

From technical design to collaborative lineup, from ecological implementation to market sentiment, Shelby is undoubtedly a high-scoring answer sheet presented by Aptos at the infrastructure level. During the Walrus large airdrop, which ignited the wealth effect of the Sui ecosystem, Aptos was once seen as a “bystander”; and now, with the backing of Jump, Shelby may just be the breakthrough point for its return to the central narrative.

Of course, challenges still remain: the difficulty of performance realization, the migration costs for developers, and the cold start of the early ecosystem… These will all be real issues that Shelby has to face next. But at least from the perspectives of market and technology, Aptos is no longer satisfied with being just a “faster and cheaper public chain”; instead, it seeks innovation and change, betting on a new paradigm of data-driven on-chain economy.

When the hot data truly starts to flow, the next wave of Web3 may also set sail from here.

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