2025 PerpDEX Competition: Technological Evolution, Current Landscape, and Future Growth

Jan 28, 2026 08:23:28

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Introduction

After years of exploration, by 2025, on-chain perpetual contract exchanges (hereinafter referred to as PerpDEX) entered a phase of rapid growth, with trading volume and other key metrics significantly increasing. The rise of hybrid centralized limit order book (CLOB) models has greatly enhanced the performance and user experience of exchanges, successfully narrowing the core gap with centralized exchanges (CEX).

In this report, NOX Research systematically analyzes the panorama and current status of the PerpDEX track, the evolution of technology, and provides a detailed interpretation of the core characteristics of leading projects such as Hyperliquid, Lighter, Aster, and the RFQ model representative Variational. Finally, it delves into future growth points and global regulatory trends in the sector, providing comprehensive references for industry participants.

Key Takeaways

In 2025, PerpDEX trading volume experienced explosive growth, soaring from approximately $1.5 trillion in 2024 to about $7.9 trillion (DefiLlama data), marking a transformation of on-chain derivatives from the fringe to the mainstream, with a significant reduction in the performance and liquidity gap with centralized exchanges. In some months, the DEX share has risen to 15-20%.

After years of exploration, the technical framework of PerpDEX has clearly moved towards CLOB, but there are significant differences among projects in terms of underlying chain selection and matching mechanisms, forming three major technical camps: L1 independent chains, L2, and multi-chain deployments.

The RFQ model has emerged as a supplementary track, represented by Variational, which leverages customized quoting services and OLP self-market-making to carve out differentiated competitive space.

The potential of U.S. stocks, commodity forex derivatives, brokerage ecosystems, and AI Agent economies may be future growth directions.

The regulatory framework is gradually becoming clearer, with compliance and asset tokenization becoming core prerequisites for the long-term development of the track.

The current wave of PerpDEX enthusiasm was initiated by the $HYPE TGE on November 29, 2024, with significant enhancements in on-chain user experience combined with a massive wealth effect. Hyperliquid's market share once climbed to a natural monopoly of 70%. With Aster launching trading mining and Lighter opening its mainnet in September and October, the high expectations for OTC point value have completely ignited the track, gradually forming a three-way competitive landscape in trading volume.

Due to the airdrop-driven trading volume of exchanges other than Hyperliquid, real user behavior is difficult to reflect in trading volume. However, through the open interest data (OI), it is evident that Hyperliquid still occupies a dominant position in the track.

Looking to the present, we should learn from the past; without the past, there is no present. In the following sections, we will review the technical framework evolution of on-chain derivatives trading to better understand the flourishing PerpDEX track today.

1. The Technical Evolution of PerpDEX: From Efficiency Compromise to Performance Breakthrough

The development of PerpDEX has always revolved around the balance between "decentralization" and "trading efficiency." The technical framework has undergone multiple iterations, ultimately forming a mainstream pattern centered on CLOB by 2025.

The development of PerpDEX is essentially a continuous balancing act between "decentralized characteristics" and "trading efficiency." From the AMM paradigm that opened up trustless trading, to various model iterations and optimizations, and finally to the solidification of the CLOB architecture in 2025, the technical framework has evolved along the path of "AMM→vAMMs→Peer-to-Pool→Hybrid Order Book→Off-chain Order Book→On-chain Order Book," achieving a critical leap from "efficiency compromise" to "performance breakthrough."

1.1 Foundation: AMM Mechanism

As the early foundational model of the PerpDEX track, the AMM (Automated Market Maker) mechanism was the first to solve the landing problem of decentralized derivatives exchanges. Its core advantages of permissionless and counterparty-free matching opened the exploration path for on-chain perpetual contract/derivatives trading.

Represented by early GMX (v1) and Perpetuals Protocol (early versions), the AMM mechanism completed transactions through oracle pricing + liquidity pools, eliminating the need for traditional order books, allowing traders to interact directly with the liquidity pool. This model pioneered a trustless derivatives trading paradigm, maximizing the preservation of blockchain's decentralized characteristics while also providing a price discovery venue for long-tail assets.

Core pricing logic (taking GMX v1 as an example):

Trading prices primarily rely on the index price provided by oracles (such as Chainlink aggregating prices).
Execution essentially achieves zero slippage, but actual prices are influenced by liquidity pool depth and funding rate adjustments.
The funding rate is dynamically calculated based on the imbalance of long and short positions to balance the forces of both sides.

However, the shortcomings of the AMM mechanism are also quite prominent, with the following major issues:

Oracle delays and price deviations: Oracle updates have delays (usually from a few seconds to tens of seconds), making it easy to have price mismatches in highly volatile markets, leading to oracle price lag issues.
Execution speed and slippage contradiction: Although claiming zero slippage, large transactions can still significantly shift pool prices (especially when liquidity is insufficient).
Impermanent loss (IL): Liquidity providers (LPs) face the risk of impermanent loss during sharp price fluctuations.
Low capital efficiency: Real liquidity pools require substantial capital to support depth, leading to a lot of idle funds.
Inability to fully compete with CEX: In terms of speed, depth, and price discovery efficiency, it has always lagged behind centralized exchanges, serving only as a transitional solution for early exploration.

Therefore, while AMM pioneered the path for decentralized perpetuals, it has always struggled to compete with CEX on core trading efficiency, playing more of a role in "technical validation and user education."

1.2 Optimization: vAMMs Mechanism

To address the slippage, impermanent loss, and capital efficiency issues of traditional AMMs, the industry introduced the vAMM (virtual Automated Market Maker) architecture. It optimizes capital efficiency through "virtual asset pools," representing another significant iteration direction after AMMs, but still fails to break through core bottlenecks. The vAMM mechanism, represented by Perpetual Protocol (Perp v1/v2), has the following core design:

It replicates the liquidity curve of traditional AMMs (such as constant product x·y=k) but does not set up real asset pools.
Price discovery is entirely determined by the virtual pool (virtual assets are issued by the protocol without real reserves).
Real assets (collateral/profit and loss) are stored in independent smart contract vaults, separating them from pricing logic.
Traders can adjust the steepness of the price curve by controlling liquidity depth parameters (the k value can be adjusted), thereby reducing slippage risk.
Avoids LPs facing impermanent loss (lack of real asset hedging demand).

To solve the slippage and impermanent loss issues of the AMM mechanism, the industry introduced the vAMMs virtual architecture, optimizing capital efficiency through "virtual asset pools," becoming an important technical iteration direction after AMMs, but failing to break through core bottlenecks.

The vAMMs mechanism, represented by Perpetual Protocol, centers on replicating the AMM liquidity curve without setting up real asset pools—virtual assets are issued by the protocol, while real assets are uniformly stored in independent smart contract vaults. Its design intention is to reduce slippage risk through artificial control of liquidity depth while avoiding impermanent loss for liquidity providers, thus enhancing capital efficiency.

|--------|---------------|------------------------| | Dimension | Traditional AMM | vAMM | | Asset Pool Nature | Real Asset Pool | Pure Virtual Pool (used only for pricing) | | Impermanent Loss | LPs need to bear | LPs very low | | Slippage Control | Relies on real pool depth, large orders have high slippage | Adjusts k value to artificially control depth, slippage is adjustable | | Price Source | Oracle + Pool State | Completely determined by virtual AMM curve (combined with oracle to prevent manipulation) | | Price Deviation Risk | Relatively low (pool affected by real trades) | Relatively high (virtual pool easily deviates from market price in extreme conditions) | | Capital Efficiency | Relatively low (requires substantial real funds) | Extremely high (no real reserves needed to support depth) | | Applicable Scenarios | Mainstream assets with good liquidity | Long-tail assets, early markets, experimental markets |

However, the vAMM mechanism also has fatal flaws:

Price divergence from the real market: The virtual pool struggles to reflect real market supply and demand in real-time, especially during market volatility or one-sided trends, leading to significant price divergence.
Inability to fundamentally sync with the spot market: Lacks real order flow feedback, making it easy to accumulate bad debt risks or require additional liquidation/rebalancing mechanisms.
Still a transitional solution: Although it significantly outperforms traditional AMMs in capital efficiency and LP friendliness, its core price discovery efficiency still cannot compete with CEX or hybrid order book models, thus it has yet to become the mainstream pricing paradigm for perpetual DEXs.

AMM laid the foundation for decentralized perpetuals, while vAMM made significant optimizations in capital efficiency and LP experience, but both are limited by the fundamental bottleneck of "inability to perfectly sync real market depth and prices."

1.3 Transition: Peer-to-Pool Model

From 2022 to 2024, the Peer-to-Pool model became the mainstream during the transitional phase, inheriting the advantages of AMM pooled liquidity while optimizing risk and efficiency through proprietary liquidity pools, driving phased innovation in the PerpDEX ecosystem.

Promoted by platforms like GMX and MUX, the Peer-to-Pool model relies on proprietary liquidity pools such as GLP and MUXLP, allowing traders to interact directly with the liquidity pool rather than matching with other traders—profits are paid by the liquidity pool, while losses are absorbed by it. The core advantages of this model lie in its composability and sustained liquidity. From 2022 to 2023, new yield primitives based on GLP achieved significant innovation in the Arbitrum ecosystem, while oracle pricing mechanisms also reduced impermanent loss, achieving zero slippage trading.

However, this model still has not escaped the risk trap: it heavily relies on the reliability of oracle data. In 2022, GMX on Avalanche suffered an attack due to manipulated oracle prices; at the same time, liquidity providers must bear the risk of asset price fluctuations, and if traders continue to profit, it will erode the value of the liquidity pool, laying the groundwork for subsequent technical iterations.

1.4 Exploration: Off-chain Order Book

While the pooling model iterated, protocols represented by dYdX chose another technical path—off-chain order books. By moving core trading processes off-chain, they achieved breakthroughs in trading efficiency, becoming important representatives in the efficiency exploration of the PerpDEX track.

dYdX's exploration of off-chain order books began with version 3, building a trading system based on off-chain order books on the Ethereum Layer 2 Starkware. The core idea is to execute high-frequency processes such as order matching and asset position management off-chain, retaining only the trading settlement on-chain. This design closely aligns with the operational logic of centralized exchanges, effectively avoiding the high gas fees and slow transaction speeds of the Ethereum mainnet, achieving high-performance perpetual contract trading—relying on Starkware's scaling technology, the trading experience of dYdX v3 significantly improved, with trading volume rapidly increasing, surpassing $1 trillion by July 2023, becoming the leading project in the PerpDEX track at that time.

From a technical logic perspective, the core decisions regarding order matching and coin listings in dYdX v3 are centralized and dominated by the development team. This "centralized execution + on-chain settlement" model achieves a preliminary balance between trading efficiency and capital security.

However, the off-chain order book of version 3 still has obvious shortcomings: insufficient decentralization, with order book control concentrated in a single entity, lacking transparency, and potential risks such as MEV manipulation and hidden accounts, deviating from the core characteristics of trustlessness in blockchain.

To address this issue, dYdX launched version 4 (dYdX Chain) in October 2023, building an independent blockchain based on the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint PoS consensus protocol, entrusting the order book and matching engine to globally distributed validators, with coin listings decided by on-chain governance, achieving a key upgrade from centralized off-chain order books to decentralized ones.

dYdX's exploration of off-chain order books provides important experience for the PerpDEX track: off-chain order books can effectively break through on-chain performance bottlenecks, achieving trading efficiency comparable to CEX, but the issue of insufficient decentralization needs to be addressed through innovations in underlying architecture. Its evolution from v3 to v4 is essentially a continuous balance between "efficiency" and "decentralization" in the off-chain order book model, also providing important technical references for the solidification of CLOB + high-performance chain architecture in 2025.

1.4 Mainstream: CLOB + High-Performance Chain

After years of exploration, by 2025, the PerpDEX track completed a technical paradigm shift, with almost all next-generation protocols turning to the CLOB + high-performance chain (L1/L2) architecture. This architectural innovation presents three core trends, building a three-dimensional advantage of "trustworthy + efficient + liquid":

On-chain trustworthiness: Achieving verifiable and auditable full-process from order matching to settlement, completely eliminating off-chain black box operations, mitigating risks such as MEV manipulation and hidden accounts, maximizing the preservation of blockchain transparency and permissionless core values.
Performance leap: By utilizing customized L1 (such as Hyperliquid's independent chain) or ZK-Rollup L2 (such as Lighter's self-built ZK application chain) technologies, reducing transaction latency to sub-second levels and increasing throughput to thousands of TPS, fully meeting high-frequency trading demands, narrowing the performance gap with CEX to within 15%.
Liquidity matching separation: By activating market makers and traders separately through independent incentive mechanisms, market makers focus on liquidity supply while traders concentrate on trading experience, solving the core pain points of insufficient liquidity and conflicts of interest between LPs and traders in early models.

Thus, PerpDEX retains the core advantages of decentralization and transparency while achieving a significant improvement in trading efficiency over early models, successfully narrowing the gap with CEX and forming a mainstream pattern centered on CLOB, ushering in a mature stage of decentralized derivatives trading.

However, the existing projects in the track still exhibit significant differentiation. Many projects have innovated, while others have retraced old paths. After reviewing the technical evolution, the next section will delve into the panorama and core project analysis of the PerpDEX track in 2025.

2. Panorama and Core Project Analysis of the PerpDEX Track in 2025

In 2025, the PerpDEX track presents a competitive landscape dominated by three strong players. Despite years of exploration, there are still significant differences in underlying chain selection and technical architecture among projects.

2.1 Technical Route Overview of PerpDEX in 2025

|----------------------|-------------------------------|-----------------------------------| | Project | Technical Route | Core Characteristics | | Hyperliquid | Independent L1, self-developed HyperBFT, fully on-chain order book | Customized underlying chain, extreme performance optimization, clear decentralization path | | Lighter | ZK-Rollup L2, off-chain matching, ZK on-chain for trust | Efficient scaling through ZK technology, inheriting Ethereum liquidity | | edgeX | StarkEX ZK-Rollup, referencing dYdX v3 architecture | Similar to dYdX v3, centralized execution + on-chain settlement brings advantages, facing decentralization challenges | | Extended, Paradex | Starknet Stack | Modular expansion solutions based on ZK-STARK technology | | Aster, StandX | Multi-chain deployment | Cross-chain coverage | | Pacifica, BULK, Bullet | Based on Solana public chain | Leveraging Solana's high-performance advantages, deeply cultivating niche ecosystems | | Variational | RFQ model | Self-market-making, targeting both retail and institutional customized quoting trading scenarios |

2.2 In-depth Analysis of Core Projects

Hyperliquid: Independent L1, Fully On-Chain Order Book

Hyperliquid is currently the most representative fully on-chain order book model independent L1 project in the PerpDEX track.

Initially built on Arbitrum, after deployment on the Arbitrum Goerli testnet, it failed to meet the team's performance expectations and candidly disclosed unexpected technical challenges such as block generation issues. It later chose to build on the technical foundation of dYdX v4, rewriting the CometBFT (originally Tendermint) consensus mechanism in Rust to create HyperBFT consensus, constructing a fully on-chain order book independent L1.

Its core advantages lie in extreme trading performance and decentralization characteristics. Fully on-chain matching ensures all transactions are auditable, with no hidden risks; HyperBFT consensus theoretically achieves millions of TPS. Through the HIP-3 proposal and Builder Codes mechanism, Hyperliquid is building an open ecosystem, attracting developers to build derivative applications based on its order book, rather than being limited to trading functions.

The HYPE TGE event became the largest airdrop in crypto history, igniting community attention as a landmark event. Subsequently, Jeff's personal background and team story were widely disseminated, combined with the marketing effects brought by the exposure of on-chain activities of whales and insider traders like James Wynn, driving a rapid influx of users and developers.

For L1, the early liquidity "chicken-and-egg" problem is its main challenge. The early Arbitrum USDC bridge was almost the only capital entry point and carried contract bridge risks. However, as it gradually developed, native USDC and USDT have been integrated, gradually overcoming the most challenging phase of L1 growth.

Moreover, for the order book, with the continuous entry of institutions in 2025, this issue has been alleviated through market maker incentive programs. To date, Hyperliquid occupies a major share of the PerpDEX track, becoming the preferred platform for institutional users.

Lighter: ZK-Rollup L2

Lighter's development journey has been quite rocky, transitioning from a spot DEX on Arbitrum to ZK technology research and ultimately focusing on the PerpDEX track by launching its self-built ZK-Rollup application chain.

Technically, Lighter achieves efficient scaling through ZK-Rollup architecture, with transaction latency as low as 300 milliseconds and throughput reaching 1000 TPS, approaching CEX levels. Its core innovation lies in separating order matching and settlement, completing matching on the ZK chain, ensuring efficiency while retaining on-chain verifiability. That is, after matching and clearing are processed by a neutral off-chain sequencer, they are handled by ZK circuit Prover for on-chain verification.

The business model is the more striking part. Robinhood appeared in Lighter's second round of financing, and CEO Vladimir was previously the chief advisor for Robinhood. Lighter also adopted Robinhood's most famous business model: zero fees for retail users:

On-chain variant of Payment for Order Flow (PFOF)

The order flow of retail users (especially the directional and sentiment-driven trades common among retail investors) has high predictive value, making it easy for professional market makers or institutions to use it for hedging, arbitrage, or improving their quotes.

Lighter routes these retail orders to cooperating institutional market makers or liquidity providers (LLP - Lighter Liquidity Providers). These institutions are willing to pay fees to gain priority access, better execution prices, or exclusive order information.

This is similar to how Robinhood sells retail orders to high-frequency market makers like Citadel and Virtu, who profit through small price differences or reverse trades. Lighter's version is more transparent: the value of order flow is reflected through on-chain auditable means, avoiding the black box controversies of traditional PFOF.

Layered accounts and delay/performance trade-offs:

Retail accounts (zero fees): Enjoy 0% fees but have higher transaction delays, suitable for medium to low-frequency, non-high-frequency retail users.
Premium accounts (institutional): Voluntarily pay low fees in exchange for lower latency and priority execution.

Through this design, Lighter separates performance and costs: retail users are "free" but sacrifice speed, while institutions pay for competitive advantages. This ensures the sustainability of zero fees while allowing high-value order flow to naturally flow to paid channels.

However, the project faces skepticism regarding its unclear decentralization path, as L2Beat data shows its current validator distribution is relatively centralized. Nevertheless, after launching its mainnet in 2025, the incentive mining program successfully activated liquidity, rapidly increasing its market share to 25% within three months, making it the fastest-growing project in the track.

Aster: Multi-Chain Deployment, Moving Towards L1

Aster was formed through project mergers and has rapidly grown under the background of CZ's public endorsement and investment as a key competitor to Binance's PerpDEX. It currently adopts multi-chain deployment while advancing L1 testnet development.

Its core advantage lies in ecological compatibility, allowing users to access trading on multiple mainstream public chains without needing cross-chain transfers to switch markets, effectively integrating multi-chain liquidity. After launching in September 2025, Aster quickly covered a batch of perpetual contract trading for small to medium market cap crypto assets with its differentiated asset support strategy, attracting a large number of long-tail users.

Currently, Aster is advancing L1 testnet iterations, planning to solve the cross-chain collaboration issues brought by multi-chain deployment through an independent underlying chain. If successfully implemented, it will further enhance its competitive barrier. By the end of 2025, Aster's market share had reached 19%, forming a competitive landscape alongside Hyperliquid and Lighter.

Variational: RFQ Model

Variational steps outside the mainstream CLOB framework, adopting the RFQ (Request For Quotation) mechanism, achieving self-market-making through OLP (own liquidity pool), focusing on institutional and large transaction scenarios.

The core value of the RFQ mechanism lies in transparency and fairness. Traders can simultaneously request quotes from multiple market makers, and the system automatically selects the best quote for one-click execution, leaving a complete log of the process, perfectly solving the price unfairness issue in large transactions. This model combines the customized services of traditional OTC trading with the transparency of blockchain, shortening the quote request time from several minutes in traditional models to within seconds.

Although it cannot compete with the three leading players in terms of trading volume scale, its precise targeting of institutional large transaction scenarios allowed it to capture 8% of the market share in 2025, becoming an important supplementary force in the track, proving the survival space of non-CLOB models.

Due to differences in technical architecture, future PerpDEX may gradually distinguish between two development approaches:

Protocol-based order books: Gradual decentralization through L1, progressively achieving neutral, open, permissionless access to order books, with liquidity abstraction, represented by Hyperliquid gradually opening through Builder Codes and HIP-3. It is expected that Aster will also reference this path after launching L1 AsterChain.
Application-based exchanges: Lighter, edgeX's AppChain, Variational's self-market-making, developing in a relatively neutral manner.

3. Future of the PerpDEX Track

The explosive growth in 2025 laid the foundation for the PerpDEX track, which continues to explore growth space. Next, the report will predict future trends in the track from the perspectives of TradFi Perps, AI Agent economies, and brokerage economics.

3.1 TradFi Perps and Long-Tail Markets

Taking Hyperliquid as an example, the project allows any user to stake 50,000 HYPE to build a permissionless contract market based on its ecosystem through the HIP-3 proposal (Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3). Currently, five HIP-3 ecological projects have officially launched, focusing on U.S. stocks and commodity forex: TradXYZ, Felix, and Markets, targeting Pre-IPO company contracts: Ventuals, and using USDe as the core collateral: HyENA.

Among them, TradXYZ has become a phenomenal benchmark, directly driving equity perpetual contracts to become the core growth engine of the PerpDEX track, with OI surpassing $1 billion and daily trading volume reaching $500 million. These innovative products deeply integrate traditional stock assets with the flexible characteristics of perpetual contracts, supporting investors to trade U.S. stocks, Hong Kong stocks, and other mainstream targets 24/7 without bearing delivery risks, significantly lowering the participation threshold in traditional financial markets.

TradXYZ was the first to launch perpetual contracts for leading U.S. stocks such as the Nasdaq 100 index, Tesla, and Apple, quickly expanding to commodities like gold and silver, as well as forex categories like euros and yen. By 2025, the trading volume of such products had risen to 12% of the total trading volume in PerpDEX, demonstrating strong market explosive power.

In terms of market size comparison, by 2025, the total market capitalization of U.S. stocks approached $70 trillion, with the annual nominal trading volume of options and futures related to equity and related indices around $25 trillion, resulting in a trading scale to market capitalization ratio of only 35%. In contrast, in the crypto market, if calculated based on a total market capitalization of $4 trillion, the annual nominal contract trading volume reaches as high as $60 trillion, with the ratio soaring to 1500%.

The nearly 40-fold disparity in this gap primarily stems from the significant advantages of perpetual contracts over traditional options and futures tools—they greatly reduce capital thresholds and understanding difficulties, significantly broadening the user audience, thereby driving large-scale trading volumes.

Thus, it is evident that the on-chain trading of quality real-world assets will become the core focus of the next phase of the PerpDEX track. The rich asset categories covered by leading exchanges in traditional financial markets, such as CME, ICE, and Cboe, are all blue ocean areas that PerpDEX urgently needs to explore.

|-----------|--------|------------------------|--------------------| | Exchange | Asset Category | Subcategories | Annual Nominal Trading Volume (Billion USD) | | CME Group | Interest Rates | U.S. Treasury futures and options | 3,588,000 | | | Interest Rates | SOFR futures and options | 63,000 | | | Interest Rates | Federal funds futures | 11,000 | | | Stock Indices | E-mini S&P 500 futures and options | 1,220,000 | | | Energy | WTI crude oil, natural gas futures and options | 35,700 | | | Agricultural Products | Soybeans, corn futures and options | 20,000 | | | Forex | Euro/USD futures and options | 18,000 | | | Metals | Gold, silver futures and options | 8,200 | | ICE US | Energy | Brent crude oil, natural gas futures and options | 200,000 | | | Interest Rates | U.S. interest rate futures and options | 120,000 | | Cboe | Stock Index Options | SPX, VIX options | 2,800,000 | | | Individual Stock Options | U.S. individual stock options | 420,000 | | | ETF Options | ETF-related options | 180,000 |

With the continuous expansion of the on-chain 24/7 trading asset matrix, combined with Ventuals launching contract markets for unlisted giants like SpaceX and OpenAI, more investors can access previously hard-to-reach quality asset exposures. At the same time, the on-chain price discovery mechanism will gradually improve and mature within the PerpDEX ecosystem.

It is worth noting that the innovations in the PerpDEX track are not limited to mainstream assets. Currently, Trove has opened public testing for collectible contract markets, supporting contract trading for niche categories such as Labubu toys, Pokémon cards, and CSGO skins, marking PerpDEX's deep exploration towards covering long-tail assets.

3.2 Broker Layer

The core distinction in traditional finance lies in the distribution layer and the market layer. The most profitable entities are not the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, or Shanghai Stock Exchange, but rather retail platforms like Robinhood, Eastmoney, and Futu. Retail platforms like Robinhood occupy the distribution layer, capturing high-profit margins, while exchanges like Nasdaq are positioned in the market layer, with their pricing power structurally limited, leading to a commoditized economic model for trade execution.

This trend is currently primarily led by Hyperliquid. Since the inception of the Builder Codes model and the establishment of a brokerage system for profit-sharing, the PerpDEX track is witnessing the emergence of Broker layer services. These Broker platforms do not directly build trading infrastructure but instead provide front-end services based on the order books of leaders like Hyperliquid, achieving commercial value through traffic aggregation. Meanwhile, trading scenarios are also diversifying, with perpetual contracts for commodities, forex, and other assets gradually being implemented, further enriching the track's ecosystem.

Based, as a leading brokerage, simplifies trading processes, optimizes user interfaces, and provides personalized services, lowering the participation threshold for ordinary users, achieving tens of millions of dollars in revenue by 2025. Mainstream wallets like Phantom, Metamask, Rabby, and Rainbow are also integrating, providing contract functionalities to users at minimal cost, generating substantial revenue.

Phantom can enhance product functionality and user experience without building its own trading infrastructure, while Hyperliquid can access Solana's user base, many of whom may not even realize they are interacting with Hyperliquid.

Such business models are not only emerging in the PerpDEX track; after maturing, they have been borrowed by the prediction market track. Polymarket has already launched a Builder Program in October this year, incubating a rich brokerage ecosystem, referencing NOX Venture's in-depth research report on the prediction market track: "2025 Prediction Market Landscape Reassessment: From Speculative Tools to Financial New Paradigms."

3.3 AI Agent Economy

The combination of AI technology and trading scenarios is becoming a new hotspot in the track. Multiple platforms have launched AI trading strategy tools to help users optimize entry timing and risk control, and some platforms have even held AI trading competitions to attract developers to participate in strategy iterations.

This year, the AI trading competition initiated by Nof1.ai's core project Alpha Arena has attracted global attention. In the first competition, six top large language models participated with independent accounts using $10,000 in real funds, including:

DeepSeek Chat V3.1 (China's Huanshan Quant)
Qwen3 Max (Alibaba)
Grok 4 (xAI)
Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Anthropic)
Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google)
GPT-5 (OpenAI)

They traded completely autonomously, without human intervention. All models used the same prompt, market data input, and tool framework to ensure fair comparison. The trading was conducted on Hyperliquid. After the launch of HIP-3, Alpha Arena also launched a second AI U.S. stock contract trading competition.

In the long term, decentralized, censorship-resistant on-chain order books will become the core infrastructure of the Agent economy. As AI Agent technology matures, autonomous trading agents can perform 24/7 trading operations based on on-chain order books without human intervention. The gradual decentralization path of platforms like Hyperliquid is providing a safe and trustworthy operating environment for the Agent economy, which is expected to give rise to a new trading ecosystem in the future.

4. Regulatory Trends

4.1 Gradual Clarity of Regulatory Framework

Taking the United States as an example, the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) has clarified that perpetual contracts themselves are not illegal in the U.S. However, if they are to be listed and traded in regulated markets (such as registered designated contract markets DCM or swap execution facilities SEF), they must comply with the provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), including submitting product terms through self-certification and meeting requirements for risk management, customer protection, and market integrity.

Moreover, the CFTC issued a Request for Comment (RFC) in April 2025, focusing on "the trading and clearing of 'perpetual' derivatives in CFTC-regulated markets." This is a proactive regulatory exploration by the CFTC in recent years regarding cryptocurrency derivatives, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics, potential benefits, and risks of this new type of derivative, which has no expiration date and maintains its price anchored to the underlying asset through a funding rate mechanism.

The RFC focuses on the following aspects of perpetual derivatives:

Product characteristics: Including differences between different perpetual contracts, the funding rate mechanism, and distinctions from traditional futures or swaps.
Impact on trading and clearing: Effects on risk management, liquidity, and price discovery.
Potential risks: Market integrity (such as the possibility of manipulation), customer protection (especially for retail investors), and clearing risks.
Regulatory applicability: Whether existing rules are sufficient to cover such products and whether additional guidance or new regulations are needed.

Crypto giants like Hyperliquid Labs and Paradigm have gathered top lobbying teams to submit comments to the CFTC.

Hyperliquid Labs submitted a comment letter in May 2025, praising the CFTC's proactive stance, emphasizing that DeFi models (such as on-chain order books, real-time funding rates, automatic liquidation, and non-custodial) can enhance market transparency, efficiency, and user protection, even exceeding traditional centralized systems.

It advocates for principles-based regulation rather than forcibly applying old classifications (such as requiring registration as DCM/SEF) to support innovation and allow U.S. retail participation in DeFi perpetual contracts.

Stepping outside of PerpDEX.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins' "Project Crypto" speech has clearly conveyed the U.S. attitude towards crypto: comprehensive financial on-chain; the DTCC received a "No-Action Letter" from the SEC, allowing traditional securities (such as stocks, ETFs, and government bonds) to become "digital tokens" on the blockchain.

Federal Reserve Governor Waller proposed the concept of a "streamlined master account" at the 10.21 payment innovation conference, exploring direct access for stablecoin issuers and crypto payment companies to the Federal Reserve payment system.

On Wall Street, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated that tokenization is akin to the internet in 1996.

The compliance powerhouse Coinbase launched a BTC Ð U.S. perpetual-style contract in July that meets CFTC regulatory standards.

The leading prediction market Polymarket has emerged from years of regulatory fog, obtaining CFTC binary options trading permission. This year, it was announced by ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, that it would make a strategic investment of $2 billion, with a post-transaction valuation of $9 billion, and the U.S. app launch is on the agenda.

Crypto is currently in a historically regulatory-friendly window, and compliance is becoming an inevitable trend. It is believed that the regulatory framework for PerpDEX will gradually become clearer, ushering in more substantial development for the track.

4.2 Outlook: Technological Iteration and Compliance Competition

In the next 3-5 years, the PerpDEX track will present two major development lines:

On the technical level, the degree of decentralization will continue to increase. Hyperliquid's gradual decentralization will progressively address the centralization risks present in some current projects, with on-chain verification and transparent clearing becoming industry standards. At the same time, the continuous iteration of ZK technology will further enhance trading efficiency, enabling PerpDEX to fully compete with CEX.

On the market level, compliance competition will become a core barrier. Platforms with licensing resources and compliance with regulatory requirements will attract institutional users, while the survival space for non-compliant platforms will continue to shrink. With the large-scale entry of traditional financial institutions, capital volume and liquidity will further concentrate towards leading compliant platforms, and industry concentration is expected to increase.

Historically, since Arthur Hayes launched the world's first Bitcoin perpetual contract on BitMEX in May 2016, introducing the funding rate mechanism, perpetual contracts have undergone nearly a decade of testing in the crypto market, becoming one of the most outstanding financial tool innovations.

The explosive growth of PerpDEX in 2025 marks the entry of the decentralized derivatives market into a mature stage. In the future, with technological innovation and compliance advancement, PerpDEX is expected to become an important component of the global financial market, providing users with safer, more efficient, and transparent trading services.

Conclusion

After sixteen years of crypto development, the industry landscape continues to expand. However, the vast majority of user traffic, core trading scenarios, and capital accumulation are still firmly controlled by centralized exchanges (CEX). The large-scale application of blockchain that idealists envision has yet to materialize.

As we enter 2025, the narrative focus of the crypto market seems to be dominated by the "on-chain casino track" leaders represented by Pump.FUN, Polymarket, and Hyperliquid. Many people have thus become skeptical about the industry's prospects, stating that Web3 is indeed trapped in a corner of finance, struggling to break through.

In reality, history shows that financial revolutions often precede industrial revolutions.

The development trajectory of decentralized trading exchanges (PerpDEX) is an evolution of decentralized technology continuously breaking through efficiency constraints and integrating the advantages of traditional finance. In 2025, the iterative upgrade of technical paradigms and the profound reshaping of market structures have solidified the development foundation for this track; the on-chain expansion of quality real-world asset contracts such as U.S. stock contracts and commodity forex, the innovative landing of AI-driven trading, and the gradual clarification of global regulatory frameworks are all pushing the PerpDEX track towards broader blue ocean markets.

For industry participants, grasping the direction of technological iteration, aligning with regulatory trends, and focusing on user needs will be key to standing out in the competitive landscape. PerpDEX is expected to reconstruct the underlying structure of global derivatives trading, becoming a core pillar of financial infrastructure in the Web3 era.

On-chain is the future.

References

Hyperliquid Docs https://hyperliquid.gitbook.io/hyperliquid-docs

Growth 0 to 1: Hyperliquid https://research.despread.io/report-growth-hyperliquid/

Hyperliquid Dashboard https://hyperscreener.asxn.xyz/home

Lighter Protocol: Order Book Matching and Liquidations with Transparent and Verifiable Computation https://assets.lighter.xyz/whitepaper.pdf

Audit of Lighter's Block Circuits https://1186887628-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FXuISSHTfjHCg60BNss6v%2Fuploads%2F1rAS0JHojcLLcERDaceR%2Fzklighter-block.pdf?alt=media\&token=3cc0f17d-7d5a-411d-800a-4c7116b6fb76

Security Review Report NM-0560 Lighter https://1186887628-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FXuISSHTfjHCg60BNss6v%2Fuploads%2FpbieGJkDU9ReEfZC3bUC%2F22-09-2025NethermindLighterCore.pdf?alt=media\&token=b271defe-c541-4d6f-90f9-a43ad39b51da

L2BEAT: Lighter https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/lighter

Aster Docs https://docs.asterdex.com/

Variational Docs https://docs.variational.io/

How Request-For-Quote Trading Works on Omni https://paragraph.com/@variational-io/how-request-for-quote-trading-works-on-omni