Original Title: The Rise of Perp DEXs
Original Source: CoinGecko
Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow
Abstract: The core data from CoinGecko's annual report is enough to illustrate the issue: the annual trading volume of DEX perpetual contracts has surged by 346% compared to the previous year, while CEX positions have decreased by 20.8% during the same period, indicating a systemic shift of capital from centralized to decentralized platforms.
This article does not just stack numbers; it clearly explains why this migration is happening, how Hyperliquid can surpass Coinbase International, and what these platforms are actually becoming after HIP-3.
The full text is as follows:
In 2025, perpetual contract trading platforms—especially decentralized ones—experienced an explosive growth, with total trading volume reaching $92.9 trillion (a year-on-year increase of 64.6%), fundamentally shifting the crypto market from spot trading to a derivatives-led price discovery mechanism.
Core Points:
· DEX perps grew by 346%, reaching $6.7 trillion; meanwhile, CEX positions decreased by 20.8%. This represents a large-scale capital migration driven by platforms like Hyperliquid (ranked seventh globally, with a trading volume of $2.9 trillion) from centralized to decentralized infrastructure.
· Capital efficiency has driven adoption: Perps allow traders to gain exposure with leverage using less capital, profiting in both directions (critical during the declines of Q4 2025), while avoiding the friction of physical settlement.
· HIP-3 achieved permissionless listings for any asset with a price source, transforming platforms like Hyperliquid from “crypto trading platforms” into 24/7 global financial infrastructures capable of trading everything from commodities to Pre-IPO equity.
Why Perps' Growth Outpaces Spot Trading
Figure: As of March 2, 2026, the top 5 decentralized perpetual contract trading platforms ranked by 24-hour trading volume on CoinGecko
Capital Efficiency: Doing More with Less Money
The fundamental advantage of perpetual contracts lies in capital efficiency. In the spot market, purchasing $10,000 worth of Bitcoin requires $10,000 in locked funds during the holding period. In the perpetual market, a trader can achieve the same exposure with only a small portion of that capital through leverage, freeing up liquidity for other positions or strategies.
Besides speculation, perpetual contracts also enable market participants to:
Hedge existing positions without selling the underlying asset (thus triggering tax events); arbitrage price differences across trading venues; express directional views without the friction of physical settlement; and simultaneously deploy funds across multiple opportunities.
Every dollar in the perpetual market works harder than a dollar in the spot market. For traders, funds, and institutions optimizing capital returns, the balance is shifting towards perps.
Market Maturity: Following the Path of Traditional Finance
The explosive growth of crypto derivatives mirrors patterns experienced by every mature financial market. In traditional finance, the derivatives market far outweighs the underlying spot market, often reaching 10 to 50 times its size. Taking the interest rate swap market as an example, its notional value exceeds $400 trillion, while the global bond market stands at around $130 trillion.
The crypto market is simply catching up. As the market matures and more experienced participants enter, the volume ratio between derivatives and spot continues to expand. The top ten trading platforms alone generated $92.9 trillion in perpetual contract volume, far exceeding the total spot trading volume of all crypto trading platforms combined.
Hedging Factors: Staying Resilient in Declines
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the value proposition of perpetual contracts surfaced during the market downturn in Q4 2025. While the spot market contracted and investor sentiment worsened, the trading volume on the top ten perpetual contract trading platforms actually increased by 64.6% year-on-year.
Why is this? Because perpetual contracts allow traders to profit in both directions. When prices drop, short positions profit significantly, and hedging activity intensifies. The ability to express bearish views keeps capital active, and trading volumes remain high even as spot bids dry up.
In a purely spot market, a price decline means reduced activity. This is reflected in the decline of CEX spot trading volume from $2.21 trillion in January 2025 to a low of $0.95 trillion in December.
However, in the perpetual market, volatility in any direction means opportunity. Data from 2025 prove that this dynamic has fundamentally altered the structure of the crypto market.
Figure: Comparison of CEX and DEX spot and perpetual contract trading volumes
The Great Migration: DEX vs CEX
Figure: Trading volumes of the top 10 Perp CEX and Perp DEX
Source: CoinGecko 2025 Crypto Industry Report
Although centralized trading platforms still dominate in absolute scale, the real story of 2025 is the rapid rise of decentralized perpetual contract trading platforms. Perp DEX trading volume soared by 346%, reaching a record $6.7 trillion for the year.
To visualize this leap: in a single peak month of October 2025, Perp DEX processed $1.18 trillion in volume, more than four times that of January 2025.
The Breakthrough of DEX
By 2025, Perp DEX had solved the fundamental usability issues that previously kept users on centralized platforms:
1. User Experience Parity: The notion that “DEXs are cumbersome” ended in 2025. Hyperliquid and Lighter offered interfaces that are virtually indistinguishable from Binance or Coinbase. The order book depth was sufficient, and executions were nearly instantaneous; ordinary traders no longer felt they were using a decentralized platform.
2. Competitive Fee Structure: Early DEXs charged a premium for decentralization. By 2025, competition and technological advances had driven Perp DEX fees to par with or even lower than CEX fees. Platforms like Hyperliquid began offering up to 90% taker rebates, matching the most competitive CEX fee structures.
3. Scalable Performance: Early blockchain-based DEXs were unable to handle the transaction volumes required by serious derivatives trading platforms. The emergence of dedicated Layer 1 chains and optimized rollups addressed this issue. For instance, Hyperliquid's custom L1 can handle thousands of transactions per second, with confirmation times of less than one second—performance that rivals centralized infrastructure.
Differentiation in Positions
According to CoinGecko's "2025 Crypto Industry Annual Report," CEX positions decreased by 20.8% in 2025, while DEX positions surged by 229.6%.
Positions—the total value of open derivative contracts—represent committed funds and beliefs. This differentiation tells us that traders are not just “trialing” DEX for quick trades; they are building substantial long-term positions on-chain.
This shift represents a reallocation of funds from centralized to decentralized infrastructure. Once this migration starts, network effects will accelerate it. More liquidity attracts more traders, which in turn attracts more market makers, further deepening liquidity.
The Rise of Hyperliquid and Lighter
The ranking of perpetual contract trading platforms in 2025 reveals significant changes in market structure. Two decentralized platforms made strong entries into the top ten, replacing established centralized players:
· @HyperliquidX: Ranked seventh globally, with an annual trading volume of $2.9 trillion;
· @Lighter_xyz: Ranked tenth globally, with an annual trading volume of $1.3 trillion.
In 2025, Hyperliquid's trading volume surpassed that of Coinbase International. This decentralized platform, established for less than two years, outgrew a publicly traded platform supported by billions in capital and years of operational history.
Coinbase International processed about $1.4 trillion in 2025. Hyperliquid reached $2.9 trillion—over twice that of the former.
Infrastructure Wins
The secret to Hyperliquid's success is not clever marketing or token incentives, but infrastructure. The platform built its proprietary Layer 1 blockchain (HyperCore), optimized specifically for perpetual contract trading.
This architectural decision has utterly dispelled the claim that “DEXs are slow.” By controlling the entire tech stack from consensus mechanism to matching engine, Hyperliquid achieves: transaction confirmations under one second; zero gas fees for market makers; over 20,000+ orders per second throughput; and 100% uptime for the year of 2025.
In contrast, Ethereum-based DEXs suffer from network congestion and variable gas costs, while other L2 solutions rely on external infrastructure. Hyperliquid's vertical integration offers a user experience comparable to centralized trading platforms while maintaining complete decentralized security guarantees.
Lighter followed a similar path, though with different technical implementations. The conclusion is clear: To compete with centralized trading platforms, DEXs must control their infrastructure fate.
Beyond Crypto: Hyperliquid's HIP-3 Revolution
At the end of 2025, Hyperliquid implemented HIP-3 (Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3), fundamentally changing its market structure.
Permissionless Listing
Previously, opening new perpetual markets required validator approval—a semi-centralized process. HIP-3 introduced a permissionless perpetual market deployment mechanism.
Any builder can now create a perpetual market for any asset with a reliable price source. No tokens, no permissions, no listing fees required.
The immediate impact was explosive. Within weeks, perpetual markets for assets that had never been traded on-chain before appeared on the platform.
A Bridge to Traditional Finance
Entering February 2026, the impact of HIP-3 has become increasingly clear. Platforms like Hyperliquid are no longer just "crypto derivatives trading platforms," but are becoming the infrastructure of global financial markets.
Currently, perpetual markets on Hyperliquid cover:
· Commodities: Perpetual contracts for gold and silver tracking COMEX futures; crude oil and natural gas; agricultural products (wheat, corn, soybeans).
· Equities: Pre-IPO companies like SpaceX and OpenAI; synthetic exposure to major tech stocks; perpetual contracts for stock indices (S&P 500, NASDAQ 100).
· Alternative Assets: Prediction markets (election outcomes, economic indicators); sports betting derivatives; weather derivatives.
This expansion signifies that Perp DEX is becoming the infrastructure for 24/7 global price discovery.
Markets That Never Close
Traditional financial markets close—New York Stock Exchange closes at 4 PM EST, CME futures markets stop trading on Sunday evenings. This causes friction, information gaps, and opportunity costs.
In contrast, blockchain-based perpetual markets never close. When traditional markets go offline, on-chain markets keep running, continuously incorporating new information.
Imagine: Major news breaks on a Sunday evening—geopolitical crisis, corporate bankruptcies, unexpected central bank actions. Traditional markets only price these events on Monday morning, potentially creating gaps and misalignments.
Perpetual contracts on platforms like Hyperliquid would immediately price in the information. As these markets deepen in liquidity, they might start influencing traditional market opening prices—the 24/7 on-chain prices are becoming reference points that traditional markets chase on Monday mornings.
Conclusion: New Frontiers for Perpetual Contracts
Data from 2025 tells a clear story: Perpetual contracts have become the dominant force in crypto trading, and decentralized platforms are rapidly closing the gap with centralized counterparts.
The numbers speak for themselves: $92.9 trillion in trading volume among the top ten perpetual contract trading platforms; DEX perpetual trading growth of 346%; DEX positions surge of 229.6%; leading DEXs have replaced major CEXs in the rankings.
As permissionless market creation becomes possible, blockchain infrastructure achieves parity in performance with centralized systems, the line between “crypto trading platforms” and “global financial markets” is disappearing. These platforms are heading towards “on-chain financial markets”—any asset with a price source can be traded here 24/7, fully self-custodied, with transparent settlement.
The spot trading model—buying and physically settling assets—will continue to exist. But in terms of price discovery, hedging, and capital-efficient speculation, perpetual contracts will dominate.
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