Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto today unveiled Shelby, a standalone hot-storage network and protocol designed for continuous, high-frequency Web3 workloads. By combining a global mesh of high-performance nodes with a dedicated fiber backbone and onchain programmability, Shelby lets developers build streaming video, AI pipelines, social timelines, and DePIN applications that operate at cloud-like speed while retaining full decentralization.
With 82.5 percent of global internet traffic dominated by video and live feeds, traditional clouds struggle to keep up without locking developers into closed systems. Shelby offers a new onchain path: a decentralized hot-storage protocol that matches cloud-level performance while keeping all data flows verifiable, so builders can create next-generation apps without compromise.
Shelby is the product of deep collaboration between two of the leading names in Web3 today in Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto. Drawing experience from their time at Meta on projects like helping to scale Instagram, many Aptos Labs engineers are building consumer-grade blockchain infrastructure for Shelby to offer fast coordination, flexible logic, and immediate production out of the box. Meanwhile, the team at Jump Crypto – as one of the most prolific infrastructure builders in the digital asset industry – is applying their experience with real-time systems and instant trading to ensure Shelby features low-latency reads and parallel data flows. Envisioned to serve data at scale with Web3 economics and Web2 speed, Shelby is positioned to introduce a new vertical of data storage to the market that unites the best of cutting-edge Web3 and Web2 technologies.
Serving data at scale with the flexibility and economics of Web3, and the performance of Web2, has been a shared challenge for leading projects. Decentralized storage has often meant cold, slow, and static systems that are great for archiving but not for action. Shelby meets diverse needs, where it is fast NFT media serving, onchain monetization for video, or real-time, rights-gated content delivery. Shelby 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.
How Shelby Works
Shelby runs 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:
- Streaming Media: Creators can deploy live pay-per-view streams or premium video tiers without cold-storage latency.
- On chain data: Serving as a decentralized source of truth for indexers and chain snapshots.
- AI Data Marketplaces: Training datasets stay immediately accessible, removing upload/download delays and simplifying version control.
- DePIN & Social: Sensor feeds and user-generated content can update in real time, empowering decentralized social feeds and onchain metering.
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.
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