The Perp DEX track has successfully crossed the technical validation period and entered a new stage of ecological and model competition.
Author: Yiran (Bitfox Research)
Abstract
The perpetual contract DEX track is expected to experience explosive growth in 2025, with market share soaring from 5% at the beginning of the year to 20-26%, and quarterly trading volume surpassing $1.8 trillion. Hyperliquid continues to lead with a $4.78B TVL and strong on-chain order book technology, but faces fierce challenges from emerging platforms like Aster and Lighter. Zero-fee models and aggressive airdrop strategies are reshaping the competitive landscape, though sustainability remains in question. Technological innovations (ZK-Rollup, application chains) and business model innovations (permissionless listings, yield-bearing collateral) are advancing in parallel, which will build a more open and transparent derivatives trading ecosystem in the long run.
1. Industry Background and Development Status
1.1 Structural Migration from CEX to DEX
2025 marks a watershed moment for the development of Perp DEX. According to the latest data, the share of DEX in the perpetual contract market has dramatically surged from about 5% at the beginning of 2024 to 20-26%, with Q3 trading volume reaching a record $1.8 trillion, an 87% increase from Q2's $964.5 billion. Q3 DEX spot trading volume hit $1.43 trillion, marking the strongest quarterly performance on record and indicating a structural shift in the pricing mechanism of the cryptocurrency market. This growth is underpinned by fundamental breakthroughs in technical architecture and the rebuilding of user trust.
The collapse of FTX and the de-pegging of Binance tokens on October 11 have fundamentally changed users' perceptions of centralized custody. "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins" is no longer just a slogan but a bloody lesson. The ratio of DEX-to-CEX futures trading volume reached a historic high of 0.23 in Q2 (equivalent to 23% of CEX volume), a figure that was less than 2% two years ago.
1.2 Intense Competition in the Perp DEX Market
Based on data from October 21, 2025, the current Perp DEX market shows a clear head effect.
In 2024, Hyperliquid rapidly emerged as the leader in the decentralized derivatives track, at one point capturing over 65% of the market share, significantly ahead of competitors like Jupiter and dYdX. However, as market attention on decentralized derivatives increased and the HYPE token performed strongly, the field quickly attracted a large influx of new competitors.
Among them, Aster stands out, having quickly replaced Hyperliquid as the platform with the highest decentralized derivatives trading volume, currently achieving daily trading volume approximately three times that of Hyperliquid. Back in July, Hyperliquid still held about 65% of the market share in this field and maintained this leading position since its mainnet launch at the end of 2024. However, according to data from October 20, 2025, Aster accounted for 40% of the perpetual contract trading volume among the top ten protocols in the past week, Lighter about 17%, while Hyperliquid dropped to 7.67%.
Perps Volume Market Share——top 10 protocol
In terms of user scale, Aster also shows significant advantages, relying on the strong BNB ecosystem, with total users exceeding 4.6 million. In contrast, Hyperliquid had a total user count of 750,000 after one year of development, showing a significantly slower growth trend than Aster. Besides Aster, competitors like Lighter and edgeX have also recently shown strong performance, making the market competition for Hyperliquid increasingly fierce.
However, this change in market share is not occurring in a stagnant market. Hyperliquid's trading volume has not changed much, and there has even been some growth. With Aster entering the competition, trading incentive activities have brought significant incremental growth to the entire market. For example, during the week from September 22 to September 29, Hyperliquid's trading volume was $80 billion, still at a high level since its launch. However, compared to Aster's exaggerated $270 billion trading volume during the same period, it appears relatively modest.
2. Core Project Analysis of the Perp DEX Track
2.1 Hyperliquid: The Moat and Concerns of the Performance King
Hyperliquid is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain focused on derivatives trading, aiming to build a fully on-chain open financial system. Its TVL has steadily grown from $4.02B in July to a peak of $6.35B in September, although it has recently retraced to $4.78B, still maintaining an industry-leading position. Its HIP-3 proposal has opened a new era of permissionless asset listings, making perpetual contracts for traditional assets like stocks and commodities possible.
Technical Advantages: Hyperliquid achieves a true on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) through the HyperBFT consensus mechanism. Its on-chain order book technology provides users with a trading experience comparable to centralized exchanges (confirmation time of less than 1 second) and a processing capacity of up to 200,000 orders per second. Most of the platform's trading volume comes from derivatives like perpetual contracts, and it has achieved rapid growth through unique economic models such as airdropping its HYPE tokens to the community and using platform revenue for buybacks, without seeking traditional venture capital.
Revenue Model: Hyperliquid adopts a highly sustainable token economic model, with its financial data strongly supporting the model's effectiveness—the vast majority of fees generated by the platform (up to $302 million in Q3 2025 as shown in the chart) are almost entirely converted into "net income for token holders" (which was $284 million during the same period) and are explicitly used for $HYPE token buybacks and burns; this deflationary mechanism, which directly links platform success to token value, not only allows for explosive wealth growth during bull markets (with revenue surging over 27 times in a year) but also provides solid support for token prices through continuous buybacks during bear markets, making it highly attractive.
Potential Risks: Facing significant unlocking pressure on SHYPE tokens. According to its token unlocking schedule, approximately 19.83 million SHYPE tokens (5.3% of circulating supply) will be unlocked in Q4 2025, which is just the beginning of long-term selling pressure. A more severe challenge begins at the end of November 2025, when a total of 238 million core contributor tokens will start to unlock linearly, expected to create daily selling pressure of up to about $17 million between 2027 and 2028. This scale far exceeds the current buyback capacity of about $2 million per day relying on the "aid fund," with selling pressure approximately 8.6 times the buyback capacity, constituting a significant structural resistance. Additionally, the protocol's relatively centralized governance structure (secured by only 24 validator nodes) contrasts with more decentralized networks like Ethereum, potentially introducing risks of single points of failure.
2.2 Aster: The Double-Edged Sword of Aggressive Growth
Aster can be considered the most controversial project of 2025. Its TVL saw a staggering sixfold increase in late September (from $367M to $2.27B), with daily trading volume exceeding $27 billion at one point, but this "rocket-like" growth has also raised questions.
Technical Innovation: Aster demonstrates a profound insight into user needs, with its product design not merely a simple accumulation of functions but rather a dual-mode platform that serves both professional traders and retail users. Currently primarily deployed on the BNB Chain, it adopts a hybrid model of "order book + vAMM." The order book is used for precise pricing of mainstream coins, while vAMM supports trading of long-tail assets with ultra-high leverage (up to 1001 times). It innovatively introduces yield-bearing assets as collateral, allowing users to trade using liquid staking tokens like asBNB or native yield stablecoins like USDF, significantly enhancing capital efficiency and achieving "earn interest while trading." For institutional users, Aster emphasizes the introduction of a "hidden order" feature, a privacy-first design that effectively prevents MEV attacks and protects large order strategies. In its early stages, the project deeply integrated with the Binance ecosystem, not only gaining a large initial user base and liquidity but also enhancing market trust through public endorsements, laying a solid foundation for subsequent development.
Controversy Focus: On October 5, DefiLlama delisted Aster due to data anomalies, primarily because the ratio of trading volume to open interest was abnormally high (up to 27 times), far exceeding normal levels. Although the official explanation cites market maker activities and incentive programs as the cause, the suspicion of "wash trading" lingers.
2.3 Lighter: A Pioneer in the Zero-Fee Revolution
Lighter represents a completely different business model approach—attracting users through zero fees while profiting from paid APIs and spreads, similar to the "payment for order flow" model in traditional finance. Its TVL achieved a robust sixfold growth (from $186M to $1.10B), showcasing a linear and sustained development trajectory.
Technical Innovation: It features a high-performance trading engine built on ZK-Rollup, which ensures ultra-fast trading delays of less than 5 milliseconds through a verifiable off-chain matching mechanism while guaranteeing the final transparency and security of on-chain settlements. This technology lays a solid foundation for its "zero fee" model and successfully attracts some capital by offering LLP liquidity vaults with up to 63% APY, creating a vibrant trading ecosystem.
Challenges: Lighter's user retention rate is relatively low, indicating that its user stickiness still needs to be strengthened. Similar to Aster, Lighter's trading volume to open interest ratio is significantly higher than competitors like Hyperliquid, suggesting a high turnover rate that may indicate a large number of short-term, speculative behaviors rather than long-term retained actual trading users. Therefore, Lighter's long-term profitability is currently in question, needing to convert the massive traffic attracted by zero fees and airdrop expectations into real users with long-term stickiness.
2.4 EdgeX: A Differentiated Competitor with Steady Operations
EdgeX, incubated by the well-known market maker Amber Group, is a relatively small but distinctive player in the current Perp DEX market, holding about 5.5% market share. EdgeX has not adopted extreme strategies in performance or incentives but occupies a solid ecological niche due to its risk control capabilities derived from its market maker genes and its deep cultivation in specific regions. It represents another path in the Perp DEX market that emphasizes steady and sustainable growth.
Market Strategy: EdgeX's users are primarily concentrated in the Asian market (China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), adopting a steady operational strategy that incentivizes users through a multi-dimensional points program, although its fee structure does not hold an advantage in competition. Its open interest to volume ratio is about 0.27, significantly lower than Hyperliquid but notably higher than Aster and Lighter, indicating that the "wash trading" component in its trading volume is relatively small, and user behavior is more genuine and sustainable. Its liquidity vault (eLP) size ($147m) is the smallest among the four, but it achieved profitability during the "1011" market crash, demonstrating robust risk resilience.
2.5 Emerging Forces and Niche Competitors
● dYdX: As a pioneer of the order book model, it has migrated to an independent application chain, aiming to create a fully decentralized high-performance derivatives exchange.
● GMX: Pioneered the multi-asset shared liquidity pool (GLP) model, characterized by no slippage trading and "real yield," making it popular among retail users.
● Paradex (incubated by Paradigm): Focuses on unified margin accounts and institutional-level services.
● Orderly Network: Provides infrastructure for other applications to offer derivatives trading capabilities.
● Drift Protocol: Holds an important position in the Solana ecosystem, providing a one-stop cross-margin trading experience.
The current Perp DEX track is exceptionally competitive, showcasing diverse development models such as high-performance on-chain order books, high leverage incentives, zero fees, and institutional-level services. From the perspective of long-term development and potential to navigate bull and bear markets, Hyperliquid, with its solid technical architecture (self-developed L1 on-chain order book), excellent performance experience, and highly transparent and sustainable token economic model (with revenue directly used for buybacks and burns), demonstrates the strongest overall competitiveness. Its deflationary mechanism, which deeply binds platform success to token value, can capture value in bull markets and provide support for token prices through continuous buybacks in bear markets, creating a strong moat. In contrast, Aster's aggressive growth is accompanied by wash trading controversies, Lighter's zero-fee model faces user retention and profitability challenges, while EdgeX is limited by its relatively niche market positioning. The future Perp DEX model will continue to evolve, but core competitiveness will increasingly focus on the combination of technological innovation, sustainable economic models, and genuine user stickiness, rather than purely short-term incentives.
3. Technological Breakthroughs: Evolving Architecture and Breaking Performance Bottlenecks
3.1. Evolution of Scalability Technology Paths
The current mainstream technical architectures can be divided into three paths, each with its advantages and disadvantages, suitable for different strategic goals:
Application Chain (App-Chain) Paradigm: Represented by Hyperliquid, it builds a dedicated L1 blockchain (such as HyperBFT consensus) to provide maximum performance customization and sovereignty for exchange applications. The advantages are extreme performance (high TPS, low latency) and a gas-free experience; the disadvantages are high development difficulty and the need to maintain a validator network and security independently. Although customized Layer 1s have multiple validator nodes and are theoretically decentralized, the actual degree of decentralization is limited due to the small number of nodes, all controlled by the team.
General L2 Rollup Paradigm: Represented by Lighter, built on Ethereum's ZK-Rollup. The advantages are natural integration into Ethereum's vast ecosystem and security, benefiting from its network effects, and strong asset composability (for example, LLP Token can easily connect to mainnet DeFi protocols). With Ethereum upgrades like Danksharding, its cost advantages will become increasingly apparent. As a Rollup, although only a single Sequencer is responsible for matching, the execution layer is centralized, but verifying ZK Proof consumes very few resources, allowing lightweight nodes to verify, thus making the verification process highly decentralized, compensating for the shortcomings of "centralized execution." Additionally, asset ledgers are all on the Ethereum mainnet, allowing users to independently retrieve funds even if the Lighter team disappears, ensuring asset security.
Hybrid Architecture: Aster adopts a hybrid architecture combining order books and ZK-Rollup, ensuring precise pricing through CLOB and supporting perpetual contract trading with leverage up to 1001 times via ZK L1 chain, effectively enhancing capital efficiency. Its overall architectural strategy shows a clear phased plan. In the current phase, Aster cleverly leverages the BNB Chain, utilizing its mature ecological resources to quickly launch the market and aggregate liquidity, avoiding the cold start problem of building its own ecosystem through this "Trojan horse" strategy. The project builds a strong community and distribution network through a series of ecological collaborations, deeply binding on-chain credit and popular tracks like Meme. Looking ahead, Aster plans to migrate to its self-developed ZK L1 chain—Aster Chain, a key leap aimed at completely resolving performance and privacy bottlenecks. At that time, with the economic incentives of large-scale airdrops, Aster hopes to smoothly guide the users and liquidity accumulated on the BNB Chain to its sovereign chain, ultimately forming a one-stop trading ecosystem with high performance, strong privacy, and cross-chain interoperability.
3.2. Revolution of Order Matching Mechanism: From AMM to On-Chain CLOB
The core of the development of perpetual DEX is the continuous evolution of the order matching mechanism, aiming to balance decentralization with performance efficiency.
Oracle Pricing Model: Represented by GMX. This model relies entirely on external oracles to provide prices, with trades executed directly at those prices. Its advantage is zero slippage, but the cost is the abandonment of on-chain price discovery functionality, making traders essentially "price takers."
vAMM Model: Represented by the early Perpetual Protocol. This model introduces virtual automated market makers, simulating liquidity pools through mathematical formulas for trading and pricing. It achieves on-chain price discovery but often suffers from high slippage due to liquidity virtualization, leading to a poor experience.
Off-Chain Order Book + On-Chain Settlement: Represented by dYdX v3. This is a key breakthrough in hybrid models. Order matching and execution are completed on high-performance off-chain servers, with only the final trading settlement results uploaded on-chain. This approach significantly improved trading speed and user experience in the early stages, marking an important step towards matching CEX experiences.
Fully On-Chain Order Book: This is the next frontier of evolution, represented by Hyperliquid. With the emergence of high-performance blockchains like Solana and Monad, as well as dedicated application chains, it has become possible to place the entire order book on-chain. This model restores the complete transparency and composability of on-chain trading and aims to solve issues like latency and front-end attacks through optimization of underlying infrastructure, representing the ultimate form of decentralized trading.
This evolutionary path clearly demonstrates the industry's shift from imitation to innovation, ultimately pursuing the provision of trading experiences that are not inferior to centralized platforms while maintaining the core advantages of decentralization.
3.3. Liquidity Pool Model: Core Innovation to Enhance Capital and Risk Efficiency
The DEX liquidity pool model significantly enhances capital efficiency and reduces trading slippage through innovative liquidity aggregation and risk management mechanisms.
Hyperliquid HLP Model: HLP participates in market making and clearing processes as the protocol treasury, earning a share of trading fees. This model employs an active liquidity strategy that can dynamically respond to market changes but carries complexities related to hedging failures and liquidation risks.
Aster ALP and USDF Combination: Aster adopts a mixed liquidity setup, using ALP (automated liquidity pool) for "simple mode" trading on-chain. USDF, as a yield-bearing stablecoin, is fully backed by a delta-neutral crypto asset portfolio and short positions, allowing users to convert assets like BNB and USDT into asBNB or USDF to achieve up to 20 times margin enhancement.
Lighter LLP Shared Risk Model: LLP collectively bears losses as a single liquidity pool, adopting a shared risk structure. This model offers a zero-fee option, achieving verifiable order matching and settlement through ZK circuits, with LLP revenue derived from counterparty profits and losses, funding costs, and settlement fees.
Jupiter Liquidity Aggregation Model: As the leading DEX aggregator on Solana, Jupiter aggregates liquidity from over 50 DEXs through the Metis v1 engine, handling more than 50% of Solana's trading volume. Its liquidity aggregation model provides deep liquidity access, minimizes slippage, and the newly launched Jupiter Lend protocol employs a custom liquidation engine and dynamic risk isolation limits.
For mature traders or institutions seeking maximum capital efficiency and leverage, Aster's ALP/USDF model may be more attractive, as it maximizes asset utility through delta-neutral strategies and up to 20 times margin, but correspondingly requires taking on higher complexity risks. For risk-averse liquidity providers, Lighter's LLP shared risk model may be a better choice, as its zero fees and risk-sharing mechanism provide a clearer revenue structure, although it requires collective loss absorption. Hyperliquid's HLP model resembles a professional, actively managed hedge fund, more suitable for users who believe in the protocol's active management capabilities and can bear the potential risks of hedging failures. For the vast majority of ordinary users, Jupiter's liquidity aggregation model may be the optimal choice in most daily trading scenarios, as it provides the best usability and trading experience by aggregating network liquidity to offer optimal prices and minimal slippage without requiring active management from users.
4. New Dimensions of Ecological Competition: From Traffic Competition to Value Creation Game
Against the backdrop of gradually maturing technical architecture, the competitive focus of Perp DEX has shifted from pure technical performance to a deeper competition in ecological building.
4.1 The Double-Edged Sword of Growth Strategies: Aggressive Incentives and "Wash Trading" Concerns
The most prominent phenomenon in the current ecological competition is that emerging platforms achieve explosive growth through high incentive strategies, but this has also sparked controversies regarding data authenticity.
● Aster's Aggressive Growth: Aster achieved daily trading volumes exceeding $27 billion and quickly surpassed 4.6 million total users by offering leverage up to 1001 times and incentive programs. However, this "rocket-like" growth has been met with skepticism. Its trading volume to open interest (OI) ratio is abnormally high, far exceeding normal levels, raising concerns in the market about the presence of significant "wash trading" activities aimed at acquiring airdrop points.
● Lighter's Zero-Fee Model Challenge: Lighter's zero-fee model successfully attracted massive traffic, but its user retention rate is low. Similar to Aster, its trading volume to OI ratio is also significantly higher than industry stalwarts (like Hyperliquid), indicating that the platform may experience high turnover rates of short-term speculative behavior rather than long-term retained actual trading users, thus casting doubt on its long-term profitability.
● Benchmarks for Authenticity and Sustainability: In contrast, Hyperliquid's trading volume growth is relatively stable, with a healthier OI/Volume ratio. Platforms like EdgeX, although holding a smaller market share, have significantly higher OI/Volume ratios than Aster and Lighter, indicating that their user behavior is more genuine and sustainable.
4.2 Deep Competition in Ecological Building: Assets, Liquidity, Business Innovation, and Fee Models
Beyond traffic, project teams are competing on a deeper ecological dimension.
● Asset Diversity Competition: Hyperliquid's HIP-3 proposal has pioneered "permissionless asset listings," allowing for the rapid launch of perpetual contracts for traditional assets like stocks and commodities, which is becoming a new strategy to attract long-tail assets and communities. Aster, on the other hand, demonstrates a differentiated understanding of this trend, focusing not merely on the quantity of assets but on building depth and integration of trading scenarios. For example, Aster has launched 24/7 stock perpetual contracts, selecting highly regarded assets like Tesla and Nvidia, aiming to provide seamless traditional market risk exposure for crypto-native users.
● Liquidity and Yield Model Innovation: In terms of liquidity and yield model innovation, leading protocols are competing for capital through differentiated designs. For instance, Hyperliquid's HLP market-making pool allows users to deposit USDC to share counterparty profits and losses, with an annual yield of about 6.7%, and the protocol injects about 93% of the fees into a support fund for token buybacks, creating a value return flywheel. Aster supports users using yield-bearing assets (like asBNB or USDF) as collateral through its ALP liquidity pool, allowing them to earn staking yields (asBNB annual yield of about 5-7%) or stablecoin deposit yields (USDF combined APY up to 16.7%) while trading, enhancing capital efficiency. In this context, innovations from other protocols are also noteworthy, such as Lighter's LLP liquidity vault attracting capital by offering high APY, with its revenue sourced from counterparty profits and losses, funding costs, and settlement profits, raising questions about the sustainability of this model under a zero-fee structure.
● Business Model Transformation: Hyperliquid and developer incentive programs encourage third parties to build new applications based on its infrastructure, while Aster's deep integration with the BNB Chain ecosystem showcases a path to rapid launch leveraging existing traffic. These innovations not only enhance capital efficiency but also create network effects, driving the entire ecosystem towards a more sustainable direction.
● Fee Comparison: A comprehensive comparison of the fee structures of various perpetual contract DEXs allows for differentiated choices based on user profiles: Lighter's zero-fee model for standard accounts is most attractive to retail and low-frequency traders; its Premium account, with extremely low taker fees, is more suitable for high-frequency traders. For passive market making and large orders, Aster and Hyperliquid, with their more advantageous tiered mechanisms and market-making rebates, become preferred choices. If sensitive to funding rate fluctuations, Aster and Lighter's mechanisms are more appropriate. In contrast, EdgeX currently shows no significant competitive advantage in its fee structure.
5. Compliance Challenges: The Sword of Damocles Hanging Overhead
The rapid advance of Perp DEX is facing immense pressure from the accelerated formation of global regulatory frameworks, with compliance becoming a key determinant of whether projects can survive long-term.
5.1 Clarification of the Global Regulatory Environment
● United States: The CFTC and SEC in the U.S. jointly announced in September their commitment to provide "innovation exemptions" for DeFi venues, explicitly including perpetual contracts and other crypto derivatives in a safe harbor pilot program, and announced plans to hold a roundtable on 24-hour markets, portfolio margining, and DeFi regulation. This policy signal indicates that regulators are shifting from a purely enforcement stance to a constructive framework development.
● European Union: Although the MiCA regulation only applies to spot crypto assets, any perpetual, swap, or other derivatives offered to EU customers automatically become MiFID II financial instruments. The final guidance from ESMA, to be released in December 2024, clearly warns that merely operating an English front end accessible from the EU could jeopardize reverse solicitation exemptions, requiring derivatives DEXs to either implement geographic blocking or obtain investment service licenses.
● Asia-Pacific Region: The regulatory framework in the Asia-Pacific region is also accelerating its improvement. The Monetary Authority of Singapore requires any platform offering leveraged crypto products (including DEXs) to hold a license under the Payment Services Act, and if derivatives are involved, approval as an "organized market" under the Securities and Futures Act is also required. The roadmap from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission indicates that trading in digital asset derivatives will only be open to "professional investors," with strict risk management and over-the-counter reporting rules implemented.
5.2 Specific Risks Faced by Projects and Responses
● User Jurisdiction Risk: Platforms like Hyperliquid have a large number of U.S. users, but whether their practice of blocking U.S. IPs can withstand the SEC's strict scrutiny remains highly uncertain. Additionally, their business model heavily relies on user loyalty and sustained revenue growth; if future regulations tighten and require platforms to implement KYC/AML measures, or if a deteriorating macro environment leads to trading revenues falling short of expectations, this could impact the sustainability of their ecosystem.
● Asset Innovation Red Lines: The exploration of products like stock perpetual contracts by various platforms directly enters the deep waters of traditional securities regulation, making them susceptible to joint crackdowns by global regulatory agencies.
● Exploration of Solutions: The industry is actively developing compliance technologies (RegTech), such as on-chain KYC modules, zero-knowledge proofs, and regulatory sandboxes, attempting to find a balance between decentralized ideals and regulatory requirements.
6. Future Outlook: From Traffic Warfare to the Final Thoughts on Value Reconstruction
In the current traffic competition within the Perp DEX industry, the market is gradually shifting from disorderly expansion to structural integration. This evolution not only reflects the deepening of the competitive landscape but also foreshadows the reshaping of value creation mechanisms. The following discusses potential scenarios for the industry's conclusion from the perspectives of long-term competitive integration, transformation of growth models, institutional pathways, regulatory impacts, convergence of technical architectures, and value capture mechanisms.
6.1 Long-Term Competitive Integration Pattern Beyond Market Share Struggles
The early stages of the Perp DEX market were dominated by fierce competition driven by traffic, but in the long run, this model will unsustainably shift towards oligopoly and ecological synergy. Data from 2025 shows that industry trading volume has surpassed $1 trillion, with an annual growth rate exceeding 138%, but the market share of dominant platforms is rapidly concentrating among a few leaders. It is expected that by 2027, DEX perpetual contract trading volume will account for over 50% of the overall derivatives market.
This integration is not merely a simple merger but is achieved through network effects and liquidity aggregation: leading platforms will form a "winner-takes-all" pattern through cross-chain bridging and protocol interoperability. A few platforms will dominate over 80% of liquidity, while marginal participants will be marginalized or integrated into ecological alliances. This process resembles the oligopolization of traditional financial markets, driving the industry from fragmented competition towards scaled collaboration, avoiding resource waste and enhancing overall efficiency.
6.2 Evolution from Incentive-Driven Growth to Sustainable Organic Models
The current expansion of Perp DEX heavily relies on airdrops, points, and short-term incentives, which, while quickly attracting traffic, can lead to bubbles and user attrition. In the future, the industry will gradually shift towards an organic growth model based on real yields, where protocol fee buybacks and burns will become core pillars. For example, some platforms have allocated 99% of their revenue to token buybacks, achieving a transition from speculative incentives to value anchoring.
This evolution will rely on the stable generation of trading fees and long-term incentives for liquidity providers. It is expected that by 2028, organic user retention rates will increase from the current 40% to over 70%. By reducing reliance on emissions and strengthening sustainable mechanisms for fee sharing, Perp DEX will shift from a "traffic game" to a "value cycle," thereby resisting market cycle fluctuations and achieving endogenous expansion.
6.3 Institutional Adoption Trajectory and Market Maturity Indicators
Perp DEX is currently primarily driven by retail and quantitative traders, but institutional adoption will become a key catalyst for market maturity. Data from 2025 shows that the proportion of institutional funds flowing into DEX has increased from 10% to 25%, thanks to improvements in the platforms' risk management and compliance tools.
The future trajectory will show progressive advancement: initially attracting hedge funds and asset management institutions through licensed access (such as KYC/AML options), and in the mid-term achieving scaled integration through standardized APIs and custody solutions. Maturity indicators include open interest (OI) stabilizing above $100 billion, institutional trading accounting for over 40%, and optimization of the TVL to trading volume ratio (currently about 0.3, expected to approach 0.5). This transformation will mark the leap of Perp DEX from a "retail paradise" to "institutional infrastructure," enhancing market depth and stability.
6.4 Regulatory Framework Reshaping Business Models
The evolution of the regulatory environment will become a reshaping force for the business models of Perp DEX. Currently, regulatory uncertainty has led some platforms (such as OKX's DEX project) to delay their launch, but in the long run, a clear framework will give rise to hybrid models: platforms will need to incorporate TradFi elements, such as licensing compliance and risk disclosure, in exchange for institutional access.
It is expected that by 2027, major global jurisdictions (such as the EU's MiCA and U.S. CFTC rules) will require DEXs to implement optional KYC and anti-money laundering mechanisms, which will reshape the revenue structure—from purely fee-oriented to compliance service charges. At the same time, regulation will suppress high-risk leveraged products, pushing platforms towards low-risk, transparent derivatives. Overall, this reshaping will eliminate non-compliant participants but provide a legitimate foundation for sustainable models, facilitating the industry's integration from the "gray area" into mainstream finance.
6.5 Trend of Convergence in Technical Architecture
The technical architecture of Perp DEX will evolve from diversified experimentation to standardized convergence to address liquidity fragmentation and execution delays. Currently, the CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) model has become mainstream, and in the future, it will further integrate the Intent Layer and ZK proofs to achieve cross-chain unified liquidity and privacy protection.
It is expected that by 2026, 80% of platforms will adopt a multi-chain aggregation architecture, combining HyperEVM-like EVM-compatible layers to enhance composability and settlement speed (approaching milliseconds from seconds). This convergence will reduce bridging risks and promote the transformation from "on-chain islands" to a "unified execution layer," supporting the processing of trillion-dollar transaction volumes.
6.6 Ultimate Value Capture Mechanism Determining Long-Term Winners
The long-term winners of Perp DEX will be determined by efficient value capture mechanisms rather than merely trading volume. The core lies in the closed-loop design of fee sharing: leading platforms achieve token value anchoring and user loyalty through 99% revenue buybacks and burns, ve (vote-escrowed) governance models, and PnL sharing from liquidity vaults (HLP). In the future, value capture will emphasize ecological closed loops—integrating lending, staking, and derivatives to achieve compound returns, driving the industry from "traffic capture" to "value reconstruction."
Conclusion
The Perp DEX sector has successfully crossed the technical validation phase and entered a new stage of ecological and model competition. Although platforms like Aster and Lighter have demonstrated the power of short-term growth through aggressive strategies, their data authenticity and model sustainability face challenges. Hyperliquid, on the other hand, showcases the advantages of combining technical performance with sustainable economic models. The future winners will undoubtedly be those ecosystems that can establish comprehensive advantages in technology, user experience, economic models, asset innovation, and compliance responses. Despite the challenges ahead, the trend of Perp DEX driving finance towards a more open and transparent direction is irreversible, and its long-term value is solid and full of imagination.
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