Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto Launch Shelby for Real-Time Web3 Workloads

Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto have jointly unveiled Shelby, a high-performance, hot storage network designed to support continuous, high-frequency Web3 workloads. This new network combines a global mesh of high-performance nodes with a dedicated fiber backbone and onchain programmability, enabling developers to build applications such as streaming video, AI pipelines, social timelines, and DePIN applications that operate at cloud-like speeds while maintaining full decentralization.

With video and live feeds accounting for 82.5 percent of global internet traffic, traditional cloud systems often struggle to keep up without locking developers into closed ecosystems. Shelby addresses this issue by offering a decentralized hot-storage protocol that matches cloud-level performance while ensuring all data flows are verifiable. This allows builders to create next-generation applications without compromising on performance or decentralization.

Shelby is the result of a deep collaboration between Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto, two leading names in the Web3 space. Aptos Labs engineers, with experience from projects like scaling Instagram at Meta, are building consumer-grade blockchain infrastructure for Shelby. This infrastructure offers fast coordination, flexible logic, and immediate production capabilities. Meanwhile, Jump Crypto, known for their expertise in real-time systems and instant trading, is ensuring Shelby features low-latency reads and parallel data flows. Shelby is envisioned to serve data at scale with Web3 economics and Web2 speed, introducing a new vertical of data storage that combines the best of cutting-edge Web3 and Web2 technologies.

Decentralized storage has traditionally been associated with cold, slow, and static systems, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. Shelby addresses this by offering fast NFT media serving, onchain monetization for video, and real-time, rights-gated content delivery. It introduces a new data primitive: hot, programmable storage that streams, earns, and evolves with how it is consumed. This delivers sub-second reads, enforces access rules, and supports dynamic pricing.

Shelby operates on a globally distributed network of high-performance servers connected by a dedicated fiber-optic backbone, with edge caching that delivers sub-second content access at scale. Its architecture supports usage-based pricing, token-gated reads, tipping, DRM enforcement, and smart-contract–defined access control, all without compromising performance. Shelby leverages Aptos’ 600 ms finality, 30,000 TPS capacity, and $0.000005 gas fees for coordination. While Aptos will be the native coordination layer for the protocol, Shelby is designed to be chain-agnostic with support for Ethereum, Solana and more.

“Shelby represents the next chapter for decentralized infrastructure,” said Avery Ching, CEO of Aptos Labs. “It’s not just faster or more flexible. It unlocks entirely new categories of applications that can operate in real time, scale across chains, and give creators and developers full control over their data and economics.”

“We built Shelby to end the false choice between speed and sovereignty,” said Saurabh Sharma, Partner, Head of Investments at Jump Crypto. “The ability to move data at scale, program access logic, and monetize content natively is a leap forward not just for Web3, but for the internet as a whole.”

Shelby supports a range of data-hungry applications, including streaming media, onchain data, AI data marketplaces, and DePIN & social applications. With in-depth explorations that include web2 and web3 brands like Metaplex, Story Protocol, and Pipe, Shelby signals strong cross-chain demand for real-time Web3 infrastructure and growing trust in Aptos beyond its native ecosystem.

A developer-focused devnet will go live in Q4 2025, followed by a public testnet. Cross-chain support will include Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, and expansion to other modular environments.