Aptos moves Shelby storage into private beta with real customer workloads

Introduction

Shelby, the decentralized storage platform built by Aptos Labs with Jump, has moved into private beta. It is now handling real customer workloads.

Background

Shelby entered private beta in October 2026. That came after its testnet shut down on August 3, 2026.

Enterprise Customers

Three early enterprise customers are on board. Each one stresses the system in a different way. Teepin represents the enterprise AI side. AI pipelines read huge amounts of data repeatedly, so storage speed directly shapes how fast models train and serve. Pictor Network works on distributed 3D rendering. Rendering jobs split heavy scene files across many machines, then reassemble the results. PathPulse focuses on spatial intelligence. That generally means working with location and mapping data, which tends to be large and constantly updated.

Shelby Design

Shelby is pitched as a verifiable global object storage system tuned for AI workloads. It targets sub-second read performance. Shelby is S3-compatible. S3 is the storage interface popularized by Amazon Web Services, and many developer tools already expect it.

Blockchain and Security

The blockchain part sits underneath. Aptos smart contracts coordinate the network and verify data integrity. Every write produces a sequenced cryptographic record on-chain. Shelby also uses erasure coding. This technique splits data into fragments with added redundancy, so files can be rebuilt even if some pieces disappear. The design also aims to cut the number of data copies made during computation. Shelby is specifically going after \