In the past two years, one of the most significant changes in the crypto market has not been a new public chain or a popular narrative, but rather the gradual and continuous migration of derivatives trading from centralized exchanges to on-chain platforms. In this process, Perpetual DEX (Decentralized Exchange for perpetual contracts) has evolved from an experimental product to one of the most valuable tracks within the DeFi ecosystem.

If spot trading is the starting point of DeFi, then perpetual contracts are becoming its true "cash flow core."

1. Why Perp DEX is Rising

In the traditional crypto trading system, perpetual contracts have long been the most important source of profit for centralized exchanges. Whether it’s trading fees, funding rates, or additional profits from liquidation, CEX has almost monopolized the entire derivatives cash flow. For DeFi, this is not a question of "whether to do it," but rather "whether it has the capability to do it."

Early DeFi lacked the foundational conditions to support perpetual contracts. Insufficient on-chain performance led to high transaction delays and expensive gas costs, while the low update frequency of price oracles meant that any leveraged product would be quickly exploited by arbitrageurs. Even attempts to compete with CEX in terms of user experience and risk control were challenging.

The real turning point occurred after the infrastructure matured. The popularity of Layer 2 solutions and the emergence of high-performance public chains significantly improved on-chain transaction throughput and latency issues; new generation oracle systems could provide faster and more stable price data; meanwhile, DeFi users, having gone through multiple cycles, evolved from merely "mining users" to becoming market participants with professional trading capabilities.

More importantly, the trust crisis in centralized exchanges became the last straw that tipped the balance. Asset freezes, misappropriation risks, and regulatory uncertainties led more high-frequency traders and large funds to reassess the costs of "custody." In this context, Perp DEX offers a new possibility: regaining control of asset ownership without sacrificing leverage and liquidity.

Essentially, the rise of Perp DEX represents a redistribution of derivatives profits from centralized institutions to on-chain users.

2. Why Perpetual Contracts are the Most Suitable Form of DeFi Derivatives

Among all derivatives, perpetual contracts are almost tailor-made for DeFi. Unlike futures contracts, they have no expiration date and do not require frequent rollovers; compared to options, they have a simpler structure and intuitive pricing, where users only need to judge direction and leverage without needing to understand complex Greeks or volatility models.

More importantly, perpetual contracts have a very high trading frequency. They are not "event-driven" products but rather infrastructures that can continuously generate trading demand. This is crucial for any protocol that relies on fees and liquidity scale.

For this reason, almost all successful Perp DEXs are designed around the same goal: to make trading as frequent as possible while keeping friction costs as low as possible. Whether through reducing slippage, minimizing delays, or optimizing liquidation efficiency, the ultimate aim is to attract more professional traders to stay on-chain for the long term.

3. What Problems Does Perp DEX Truly Solve

Many people simply understand Perp DEX as a "decentralized version of CEX," but this underestimates its significance. Perp DEX is not replicating centralized exchanges; it is reconstructing the underlying logic of derivatives trading.

First is the change in the trust model. In Perp DEX, user funds are always held in smart contracts, and the protocol itself cannot arbitrarily misappropriate assets. Risk exposure, margin, and liquidation logic are all publicly verifiable, meaning traders no longer need to "trust" the platform's risk control but can directly audit the rules themselves.

Second is the transparency of risk pricing. The liquidation, mark price, and funding rates of centralized exchanges are essentially black box mechanisms. On-chain, these parameters are explicitly defined by contracts, and anyone can see how the market is being liquidated and rebalanced.

Finally, there is a change in the way profits are distributed. Perp DEX does not concentrate all trading profits at the platform level but instead returns the cash flow generated by derivatives to on-chain participants through forms like LPs, Vaults, and governance tokens. This means users are both traders and potentially "shareholders" of the protocol.

From this perspective, Perp DEX resembles an on-chain risk management system rather than just a trading front end.

4. How the Core Mechanism of Perp DEX Operates

From a mechanical perspective, the evolution of Perp DEX has undergone a clear process of specialization. Early protocols often used the vAMM model to solve liquidity cold start issues through virtual liquidity pools, but this method is prone to slippage in large trades and heavily relies on arbitrageurs for correction.

As trading volume increased, order book models were gradually introduced. On-chain or semi-on-chain order books allow market makers to place orders directly, significantly improving depth and price discovery capabilities. In reality, most protocols choose a compromise solution: off-chain matching with on-chain settlement, or combining AMM with limit orders to balance decentralization and trading performance.

Behind these models, the true risk bearers are liquidity providers. LPs are essentially betting against all traders, earning fees and funding rates while bearing directional market risks. If the protocol's risk control design is inadequate, the long-term profits of professional traders will ultimately translate into systemic losses for LPs.

Therefore, mature Perp DEXs invest significant effort in liquidation mechanisms, insurance funds, and parameter adjustments. Liquidation is not a punishment but a necessary means to maintain system stability. Those who can quickly and accurately complete liquidations in extreme market conditions are the ones who qualify for long-term survival.

5. Where the Moat of Perp DEX Lies

To determine whether a Perp DEX has long-term value, one must look beyond the interface or incentives and assess whether it has established a true moat.

Liquidity depth is the first threshold; without stable depth, no mechanism can attract large funds. The security of the liquidation system and oracles is the second threshold; any serious delay or error can directly undermine market confidence. The third threshold is whether it can retain professional traders and market makers, which depends on latency, fees, and overall trading experience.

Ultimately, all moats point to the same question: can the protocol achieve long-term profitability without relying on subsidies? Only by forming positive cash flow can Perp DEX potentially become true infrastructure rather than a short-term narrative.

6. How to Use Data to Assess the Health of a Perp DEX

At the research and investment level, Perp DEX has a relatively clear evaluation framework. The relationship between trading volume and TVL can reflect capital utilization, while the comparison of overall trader profits and LP earnings can reveal whether risk control is reasonable. The stability of funding rates and the frequency and dispersion of liquidations are often more important than daily trading volume.

Additionally, the number of active traders and the structure of protocol income can determine whether the platform has truly established user stickiness rather than relying on short-term incentives to accumulate data.

7. The Risks Most Easily Overlooked in Perp DEX

Many risks do not stem from leverage itself but from system details. Oracle delays can be amplified in extreme market conditions, liquidity can be instantly depleted during high volatility, and untimely adjustments to governance parameters can trigger chain reactions.

These risks do not occur daily, but when they do, they are often fatal. Understanding these "low-frequency, high-impact" risks is a prerequisite for using Perp DEX.

Case Study: Hyperliquid's "Extreme Specialization Attempt" in On-Chain Perpetual Contracts

If most Perp DEXs start from the perspective of "how to replicate the CEX experience in a DeFi environment," then Hyperliquid's approach has been different from the beginning. It is not about "building a Perp" on existing public chains but rather redesigning a complete set of underlying infrastructure for the highly specialized scenario of perpetual contract trading.

Hyperliquid chose to develop a high-performance L1/Appchain, which is essentially a very radical but logically clear trade-off: to sacrifice generality for specialization in order to achieve matching efficiency, latency, and risk control certainty. This also determines that its target users are not general DeFi users but rather mid-to-high-frequency traders who are extremely sensitive to execution quality, slippage, and capital efficiency.

In terms of trading mechanisms, Hyperliquid employs a fully on-chain order book rather than a vAMM or semi-off-chain matching. This is crucial. An order book means that the price discovery process is closer to that of traditional derivatives exchanges, which also significantly raises the requirements for system performance, liquidation engines, and risk control models. Hyperliquid places liquidation and risk control at the system level rather than as a remedial measure afterward, making its behavior in extreme market conditions more predictable.

From the perspective of on-chain data, what is most worth studying about Hyperliquid is not a single metric but the "combinatorial relationships" between metrics.

On DefiLlama, you can observe that Hyperliquid maintains a very high daily trading volume/TVL ratio over the long term. This is not just a result of "volume manipulation" but a clear signal: the liquidity entering the system is being used in a high-frequency, high-intensity manner rather than lying idle in the pool waiting for subsidies. High capital efficiency often indicates high-quality traders.

Further breaking down the structure of active traders on Dune, it becomes evident that Hyperliquid's daily and weekly active users do not experience a brief surge during airdrops or events but rather show a relatively smooth and sustained state. Such curves typically correspond to "tool-like usage" rather than "mining-type participation." For research and investment, this is a very important watershed.

If we combine Nansen to observe the behavior of large accounts, it becomes easier to understand Hyperliquid's true moat: there are stable, participating professional accounts within the system, and their trading behavior exhibits strategic consistency rather than one-off gambles. This means that what is happening with Hyperliquid is not about "attracting users to try it out," but rather traders migrating their primary trading venues.

From a long-term perspective, Hyperliquid's risk does not lie in the product form but in the difficulty of this route itself—high-performance chains, order books, and professional traders place extremely high demands on operations, risk control, and system stability. However, once this flywheel starts running, its user stickiness and migration costs will far exceed those of typical Perp DEXs.

8. Who is Suitable for Using Perp DEX and Who is Not

Perp DEX is more suitable for traders with a clear risk management awareness rather than those who rely on emotional trading. On-chain trading means you need to take responsibility for your positions, with no customer service or human intervention. Low to medium leverage and clear stop-loss strategies are the basic survival rules for on-chain trading.

For LPs, this is also not "risk-free income," but rather a passive market-making strategy. While you earn fees, you also bear the other side of market volatility.

9. The Next Phase for Perp DEX

In the past year, the changes experienced by the perpetual contract DEX ecosystem can no longer be simply summarized as "growth"; a more accurate description would be a systematic reconstruction of trading structures and market shares. If the Perp DEX from 2021 to 2023 was still in the product feasibility and user education stage, then 2024 to 2025 will be the period where efficiency begins to dominate everything. The market's focus will no longer linger on "whether decentralized perpetuals are feasible," but will quickly shift to "which structure can sustainably support professional-level trading."

Starting with the most intuitive data, this round of changes shows a clear trend of centralization. According to the latest statistics from DefiLlama, Hyperliquid's perpetual contract trading volume reached $156 billion in the last 30 days, forming an overwhelming advantage over similar protocols in terms of scale. In comparison, dYdX v4 had a trading volume of about $8.7 billion during the same period, GMX around $3.7 billion, while Aevo, which covers both options and perpetual contracts, maintained a monthly trading volume of over $15 billion. Extending the time frame to nearly a year, this gap is not an isolated incident but a result of continuous accumulation, indicating that users and liquidity are concentrating towards a few protocols with better structures.

This trend of concentration is even more evident on the revenue side. Hyperliquid generated approximately $61.4 million in fee revenue in the last 30 days, while GMX generated about $2.66 million, and dYdX only $320,000. For the first time in the perpetual contract DEX space, projects have emerged that simultaneously create positive feedback across trading volume, active users, and real revenue, indicating that this sector is no longer just about "good-looking trading data," but has genuinely developed sustainable cash flow capabilities.

When looking at the entire DeFi market, this change is not an isolated phenomenon. The DeFi ecosystem in 2025 has entered a more mature stage, with perpetual contract DEXs adding approximately $7.35 trillion in trading volume throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of over 170%, setting a historical high; in contrast, the growth of spot DEXs relies more on cross-chain rotation, with overall net expansion relatively limited. The capital structure is undergoing a clear migration, with high-frequency, more capital-efficient derivatives trading becoming one of the core value capture scenarios on-chain. In terms of revenue share, leading perpetual DEXs like Hyperliquid, EdgeX, Lighter, and Axiom contributed about 7%–8% of the total DeFi fee revenue in 2025, a proportion that has already surpassed the total of several mature sectors like lending and staking.

At the same time, the user structure is also quietly changing. A large number of short-term speculative trades driven by meme coin trends are gradually cooling down, and the market is returning to a focus on professional demands centered around hedging, arbitrage, and high-frequency trading. Data released by Aevo shows that the number of active traders on its platform has approached 250,000, significantly higher than most similar protocols; meanwhile, the number of DYDX token holders in the dYdX ecosystem has increased from 37,000 to 68,600 within a year, reflecting its gradual recovery of user stickiness after migrating to a dedicated chain. It can be seen that the competition among Perp DEXs is shifting from "attracting traffic" to "retaining professional users."

In this phase, performance metrics are beginning to become the implicit threshold that determines success or failure. Early differences among Perp DEXs were more reflected in product design and incentive mechanisms, but now, trading execution speed, system stability, and performance in extreme market conditions directly determine whether high-frequency traders are willing to deploy capital long-term. Hyperliquid employs a dedicated L1 plus CLOB architecture, achieving millisecond-level matching and extremely low state latency; Aevo claims trading delays of less than 10ms on its customized L2; dYdX v4, after migrating to the Cosmos dedicated chain, has reduced its API response latency by about 98% compared to earlier versions. In contrast, GMX, which still operates on Arbitrum and Avalanche, is more susceptible to network load and latency during extreme market conditions.

These differences are not merely about "user experience" but directly affect whether the platform can support real high-frequency and institutional-level trading. From the trading volume trend chart over the past 12 months, it is clear that Hyperliquid's monthly trading volume has consistently risen and formed an absolute lead; dYdX showed a significant recovery after the second quarter, with a quarterly trading volume of $34.3 billion in the fourth quarter; Aevo is showing an accelerated upward trend; while GMX's growth remains relatively stable. The bar chart of revenue distribution further amplifies this structural differentiation, indicating that the market is pricing efficiency and performance with real fees.

In this context, the next evolutionary direction for Perp DEX is gradually becoming clear. On one hand, platforms will continue to evolve towards higher frequency and lower latency trading forms, attempting to replicate or even surpass the matching experience of centralized exchanges on-chain. Hybrid matching modes, state compression, and more combinations of off-chain computation with on-chain settlement may become standard infrastructure in the future. On the other hand, the diffusion of dedicated AppChains or customized Rollups is almost a certain trend; dYdX's practice has already proven that dedicated chains' advantages in throughput, governance flexibility, and parameter controllability are particularly crucial for high-frequency products like perpetual contracts.

At the same time, the boundaries between CeFi and DeFi are being redefined. dYdX's collaboration with 21Shares to launch the DYDX ETP sends a clear signal: the liquidity of on-chain perpetual contracts is seeping back into the traditional financial system through compliant products. In the future, ETPs, structured products, and hedging strategies built around Perp DEX may become important bridges connecting institutional funds with on-chain markets. Concurrently, there is further integration of on-chain derivatives forms. Aevo has already supported both options and perpetual contracts under a unified margin account, significantly enhancing capital efficiency through this multi-product shared risk control and margin model, indicating that leading platforms in the next phase are more likely to evolve into comprehensive on-chain derivatives hubs.

Of course, scale expansion does not mean the disappearance of risks. In November 2025, Hyperliquid experienced a bad debt event of about $4.9 million during extreme market conditions and quickly adjusted rates and risk parameters afterward. Such events remind the market that liquidation mechanisms, insurance funds, and dynamic risk control capabilities will be key to whether larger-scale funds can be supported. With changes in the regulatory environment, some perpetual DEXs will also proactively consider compliance frameworks and risk disclosure mechanisms to reduce systemic uncertainty.

In summary, Perp DEX is transitioning from the stage of "is anyone using it?" to "who can sustainably support professional trading?" Future competition will no longer just be a contest of trading volume rankings but a comprehensive competition around execution efficiency, liquidity quality, product completeness, and risk management capabilities. The winners of the first half relied more on subsidies and narratives; those protocols that can truly emerge in the second half will be those that can run fast enough, maintain stability in extreme conditions, and possess the ability to connect with larger financial systems. This is precisely why Perp DEX, as a core infrastructure of DeFi, deserves long-term attention.

Conclusion: Perp DEX is the Core Infrastructure of DeFi

Perp DEX is not a short-term hotspot but a core component that inevitably emerges in the maturation process of DeFi. It allows derivatives trading to operate for the first time in a trustless environment, genuinely opening up profits and risks to users.

In the future, what truly matters is not "whether there are Perp DEXs," but which Perp DEXs can survive and become the foundation of the on-chain financial system.

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