This is undoubtedly the most profitable track in 2025.
Since November 29, 2024, when Hyperliquid airdropped tokens and set off a network explosion, this track has completely entered the high-speed channel. As a representative of the new generation of order book Perp DEX, the price of Hyperliquids token HYPE once reached US$50, and has remained stable at around US$47, becoming one of the most appealing and wealth-effect projects this year.
The Perp DEX track not only has high income, but also has great room for growth, making CEX feel an unprecedented strong threat. The daily trading volume of crypto derivatives has long been 4-5 times that of spot, and the penetration rate of the on-chain derivatives market is currently less than 10%, which means that there is at least 10 times the growth potential in the future.
Just like there is never just one centralized exchange, more and more teams are joining the game, the ceiling of the track is constantly rising, and the competition is becoming more and more fierce. Major projects continue to upgrade their technology, liquidity, depth, user experience and incentive mechanisms, and have increased their investment. The clustering of projects and frequent innovations have also brought about a stronger wealth spillover effect, attracting a lot of funds and users continued attention, especially the new batch of Perp DEX players who have not yet issued coins.
Currently, Hyperliquids second season airdrop is about to start, and some other new projects with rapid growth, strong team background, and strong expectations for coin issuance are also emerging. This article will review five Perp DEX dark horses that have not yet issued coins - they are either growing rapidly, or have abundant resources, or are backed by star VCs, and are key projects that cannot be missed by the money-pulling army and contract players in this round.
edgeX
edgeX is one of the first projects incubated by Amber Group’s new accelerator launched in July 2024. It is currently very popular in the Korean community and the mobile APP experience is also good.
As a Perp DEX built on Ethereum Layer 2 based on StarkEx ZK-Rollup, edgeX can process 200,000 orders per second, with an order matching delay of less than 10 milliseconds, setting a new benchmark for the speed and efficiency of decentralized derivatives exchanges. The handling fee is 0.038% for Maker and 0.015% for Taker.
According to the latest data, edgexs actual revenue in the past 30 days reached 5.6 million US dollars, exceeding the top perp DEXs such as GMX (2.45 million US dollars) and dYdX (1.23 million US dollars). For projects ranked at the top in terms of revenue, the flow of funds is more real, and the users handling fees are real. (Although Hyperliquid has a larger trading volume, it is not included in the perp DEX comparison list by DefilLama because it positions itself as an independent chain)
In terms of market depth, edgeX currently performs the best among all Perp DEXs. Taking BTC/ETH as an example, at a price difference of 0.01%, edgeXs BTC can support a position of 6 million US dollars, surpassing hyperliquid (5 million), Aster (4 million) and Lighter (1 million). Although the overall depth is still slightly inferior to hyperliquid, in most scenarios, edgeX is the Perp DEX with the best depth except for hyperliquid.
Comparison of BTC and ETH in depth on various platforms at a price difference of 0.01%
In terms of the team, edgeX is backed by Amber Group, which has crypto and traditional financial practitioners from top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, and has more than 7 years of experience in exchange operations and trading.
In addition, perhaps thanks to the resources of the incubator Amber Group, edgeXs market-making vault has more strategic designs to help improve capital efficiency and risk management. In a typical Perp DEX structure, the vault acts as a central liquidity pool, responsible for market making and liquidation positions. Although statistics generally show positive returns within a quarterly cycle, the vault still faces the risk of unilateral market exposure, bankruptcy or funding shortage attack vectors.
Unlike the traditional MM Vault, edgeXs eLP (Edge Liquidity Pool) combines passive liquidity and intelligent hedging mechanisms. Funds always provide depth for the market and dynamically hedge large risk exposures. At the same time, the vault also has dynamic leverage adjustment and a dedicated insurance fund, which is adjusted in real time according to profit/leverage to prevent malicious operations of large funds. 10% of each profit goes into the insurance pool to buffer vault losses caused by extreme market conditions.
Next, edgeX will upgrade from the current perp app rollup (V1) to a high-performance financial chain (V2), supporting a fully modular and composable financial infrastructure.
Lighter
Lighter is a new Perp DEX in the Ethereum ecosystem. It was first launched as a spot DEX on Arbitrum in 2023, and transformed into a zksync layer 3 DEX in March 2024. In November, it transformed into a ZK Perp DEX, which is based on zk-rollup and has a similar mechanism to edgeX. On the technical level, it has achieved 5 millisecond soft finality and a matching speed of 10,000 orders per second.
Although it is still an invitation-only system, Lighters daily trading volume has stabilized at US$1 billion to US$2 billion, and its cumulative trading volume has reached US$2.4 billion, second only to Hyperliquid, ranking second in the entire network and is the fastest growing Perp DEX.
One of the reasons for the rapid growth of Lighters trading volume is its zero-fee model similar to Robinhood - both makers and takers are completely free of fees. However, while Lighters trading volume is huge, due to its zero-fee model, there may be wash trading components in the trading volume, and the platform currently lacks a solid revenue model in terms of revenue.
In terms of protocol mechanism, Lighter has a native market-making treasury LLP similar to Hyperliquid HLP. LLP allows retail investors to inject funds into a public fund pool, which is managed by professional traders and distributed according to the proportion of investment. It is also free of handling fees. However, at present, LLP deposits no longer receive points rewards. Currently, Lighter points are priced at US$5 per coin in the over-the-counter market.
As for the team, Lighter founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski graduated from Harvard University and was an angel investor of Fabric Cryptography and Daimo, with a solid background. Institutional investors include a16z, Lightspeed Ventures and other first-tier capitals.
Aster
Aster was upgraded from the merger of Astherus and APX on March 31, 2024. It originally focused on the liquidity of pledged assets and is now one of the ways for Binance to enter the Perp DEX market. Aster is highly integrated with the BNB ecosystem, natively compatible with the Binance wallet, wholly invested by YZi Labs, and has been an interactive platform for CZ many times, with strong support for ecological resources and traffic.
It is good to lean on a big tree for shade, and against the backdrop of strong expectations for coin issuance, Asters trading volume has also grown rapidly, currently standing at US$210 million.
Aster supports two trading modes. The Simple mode pursues extreme simplicity and ease of use; the Pro mode is for professional users, with a handling fee of 0.01% for Maker and 0.035% for Taker. In addition, Aster has also innovatively launched the Dumb prediction gameplay, which allows users to predict short-term asset fluctuations by minute and place bets, with a unique gameplay.
Unlike other Perp DEX vaults, most of Asters liquidity is supported by its own liquidity hub, without relying on an external market-making team. The TVL of the USDF stablecoin in the protocol has reached 130 million US dollars, and the TVL of asBNB (in cooperation with BNB chain) is about 115 million US dollars.
Data source: DefiLama
In addition, Aster is promoting the combination of U.S. stocks and contracts, which are the best in the cryptocurrency industry. It currently supports perpetual contracts for seven U.S. blue-chip stocks, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Users can use cryptocurrency as margin to trade U.S. stocks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but the depth of non-trading hours will be reduced.
In the long-term plan, Aster will also develop the Aster Layer 1 public chain specifically for on-chain derivatives trading, providing exclusive infrastructure for on-chain derivatives trading.
Ethereal
Ethereal is the first project built natively on the Ethena Network and is also the son project of the ENA community. It is supported by the USDe stablecoin. Its goal is to create a one-stop, vertically integrated DeFi platform to fully unleash the potential of USDe.
Ethereal V1 is the starting point of this vision, and will bring fully functional spot and perpetual contracts to the upcoming Ethena network. In terms of technical architecture, Ethereal adopts the EVM solution, and settlement is through Converge, Arbitrum execution environment and Celestia data availability layer. The order matching delay is less than 20 milliseconds, and the peak can process about 1 million orders and 1,000 transactions per second.
In terms of liquidity, Ethereal V1 is committed to becoming the core venue for on-chain USDe fund hedging and trading. The platform has been officially approved by Ethena governance (99.6% support rate) and has promised to allocate 15% of governance tokens to ENA stakers (sENA) in the future, which is deeply bound to the interests of the community.
On June 20, 2025, Ethereal officially launched the testnet, and users can experience high-performance on-chain trading products supported by USDe through testnet.ethereal.trade.
In the future, Ethereal will gradually launch derivative financial products including spot, lending, loans, RWA and more based on USDe, and continue to expand the DeFi landscape.
Paradex
Paradex was incubated by the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm (no relation to the venture capital firm of the same name) and is built on the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Paradex Network built on the Starknet Stack, which is positioned as a high-performance decentralized trading and asset management layer.
Although the incubator is not the well-known top crypto VC Paradigm, but the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm of the same name, it is equally worthy of attention.
Paradigm was founded in 2019 and provides services to institutions such as hedge funds, market makers and family offices. It has a long history of research in derivatives trading markets such as crypto options. Its earliest working model was to handle over-the-counter matching and hand over on-site execution, clearing and settlement to exchanges such as FTX. At its peak, it occupied 30% of the global cryptocurrency options market and completed a $35 million financing with a valuation of $400 million, led by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.
However, after the collapse of FTX, Paradigm, as a partner, was also greatly impacted. After the trading volume dropped sharply, it launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.
Thanks to its years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex features support for perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options and spot. All transactions are unified in one account, any asset can be used as collateral, and it supports position-by-position, cross and combined margin models. In terms of fees, Paradexs taker fee is 0.03%, and there is a -0.005% rebate for limit orders (pending orders).
In terms of asset management, the Paradex Treasury allows users to obtain LP tokens according to their shares, and can be combined with mainstream DeFi such as Pendle, Morpho, Aave, etc. The Treasury supports both active trading and passive income from the Treasury Trading Fund (VTF). Some LP tokens can be used directly as collateral in the future to participate in more on-chain strategies. In addition, the Paradex integrated lending market supports users to borrow directly from the same account, and the combined investment portfolio can be used as collateral.
Paradex has announced its token economics, and the community has strong expectations for its token issuance. The future uses of the platform currency DIME will include payment of transaction fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, and participation in governance/voting. Currently, Paradex is now the number one options DEX in cryptocurrency, but the growth in trading volume on perpetual contracts is not particularly outstanding.
