This is the most unquestionable big opportunity in 2025.

Since Hyperliquid's token airdrop and the subsequent surge on November 29, 2024, this sector has entered a high-speed growth phase. As a representative of the new generation order book Perp DEX, Hyperliquid's token HYPE once soared to $50 and remains around $47 today, becoming one of the most influential and wealth-generating projects of the year.

The Perp DEX sector not only offers high revenue but also has significant growth potential, posing an unprecedented threat to CEXs. The daily trading volume of crypto derivatives has long been 4-5 times that of spot trading, while the penetration rate of on-chain derivatives markets is still below 10%, indicating at least 10 times more growth potential in the future.

Just like there are not just one centralized exchange, more and more teams are entering this sector, pushing the ceiling higher and making the competition fiercer. Major projects continuously upgrade their technology, liquidity, depth, user experience, and incentive mechanisms, increasing their investments. The concentration of projects and frequent innovations have brought stronger "wealth spillover" effects, attracting a large amount of capital and users, especially the new batch of Perp DEX projects yet to launch their tokens.

Currently, Hyperliquid's second-quarter airdrop is about to start, and some other rapidly growing projects with strong team backgrounds and strong token launch expectations are also emerging. ChainThink will now profile five promising Perp DEX projects that have not yet launched their tokens—some of them are growing rapidly, have substantial resources, or are backed by star VCs, which are must-watch projects for this round of "token farming" and contract players.

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 has a good mobile app experience.

As a Perp DEX built on Ethereum Layer2 based on StarkEx ZK-Rollup, edgeX can process 200,000 orders per second, with order matching latency below 10 milliseconds, setting a new benchmark for speed and efficiency in decentralized derivative exchanges. The Maker fee is 0.038% and the Taker fee is 0.015%.

According to the latest data, edgeX generated actual revenue of $5.6 million over the past 30 days, surpassing top Perp DEXs such as GMX ($2.45 million) and dYdX ($1.23 million). Projects ranked highly in revenue have more authentic fund flows, with users' transaction fees being "real." (Although Hyperliquid has a larger trading volume, it is positioned as an independent chain and is not included in DefiLlama's Perp DEX comparison list.)

In terms of market depth, edgeX currently performs best among all Perp DEXs. For example, with a 0.01% spread on the order book, edgeX supports $60 million in BTC positions, surpassing Hyperliquid ($50 million), Aster ($40 million), and Lighter ($10 million). Although the overall depth is slightly less than Hyperliquid, edgeX is the deepest Perp DEX after Hyperliquid in most scenarios.

BTC and ETH depth comparisons across platforms at a 0.01% spread on the order book

Regarding the team, edgeX is backed by Amber Group, with experienced professionals from top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit in both crypto and traditional finance, with over seven years of exchange operation and trading experience.

Additionally, due to the resources provided by the incubator Amber Group, edgeX has a more sophisticated market-making treasury with strategies designed to improve capital efficiency and risk management. In a typical Perp DEX structure, the treasury acts as a central liquidity pool responsible for market making and clearing positions. Although quarterly revenue is typically positive, the treasury still faces risks of unilateral market exposure, "bankruptcy," or attack vectors related to funding shortages.

Unlike traditional "MM Vault," edgeX's eLP (Edge Liquidity Pool) combines passive liquidity and smart hedging mechanisms, ensuring continuous depth on the order book and dynamically hedging large risk exposures. Additionally, the treasury features dynamic leverage adjustment and a dedicated insurance fund, adjusting according to profits/leverage in real-time to prevent malicious operations with large funds. 10% of each profit goes into the insurance pool to buffer 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 fully modular and composable financial infrastructure.

Lighter

Lighter is a new Perp DEX in the Ethereum ecosystem. It was initially launched as a spot DEX on Arbitrum in 2023 and transitioned to a zksync layer3 DEX in March 2024 and then to a ZK Perp DEX in November, operating on zk-rollup with a mechanism similar to edgeX. It achieves 5ms soft finality and 10,000 transactions per second in matching speed.

Despite being invitation-only, Lighter's daily trading volume has stabilized between $1 billion and $2 billion, with a cumulative trading volume of $2.4 billion, ranking second in the network, second only to Hyperliquid, and is the fastest-growing Perp DEX.

One reason for Lighter's rapid trading volume growth is its zero-fee model, similar to Robinhood—both maker and taker are completely free of fees. However, as a result, although Lighter has a huge trading volume, its revenue model lacks solid income due to the zero-fee (0-fee) model, potentially including wash trading in the trading volume.

In terms of protocol mechanisms, Lighter has a native market-making treasury similar to Hyperliquid's HLP, called LLP. LLP allows retail investors to inject funds into a public fund pool managed by professional traders, sharing profits according to the proportion of their contributions. Currently, the LLP also charges no fees. However, the deposit in LLP no longer earns points rewards. Currently, the points of Lighter are priced at $5 per piece in the off-chain market.

Regarding the team, Lighter's founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski graduated from Harvard University and was an angel investor in Fabric Cryptography and Daimo, with a deep background. Institutional investors include a16z and Lightspeed Ventures.

Aster

Aster was formed by the merger and upgrade of Astherus and APX on March 31, 2024, originally focused on the liquidity of staked assets. Now, as one of Binance's ways to enter the Perp DEX market, Aster is highly integrated with the BNB ecosystem, natively compatible with Binance Wallet, fully invested by YZi Labs, and supported by CZ with multiple interactions, providing strong ecological resources and traffic support.

Thanks to the backing of a large tree, and under the strong expectation of token launch, Aster's trading volume has grown rapidly, reaching $210 million now.

Aster supports two trading modes. The Simple mode pursues extreme simplicity and ease of use; the Pro mode is aimed at professional users, with Maker fees of 0.01% and Taker fees of 0.035%. In addition, Aster has innovatively introduced a Dumb prediction gameplay, allowing users to predict short-term asset fluctuations by the minute and place bets, with a unique gameplay.

Different from the treasury of other Perp DEXs, most of Aster's liquidity is supported by its own liquidity hub, without relying on external market makers. The USDF stablecoin TVL within the protocol has reached $130 million, and asBNB (collaborating with BNB chain) TVL is approximately $115 million.

Data source: DefiLama

Additionally, Aster is promoting the combination of US stock futures and the most skilled contracts in the crypto world. It currently supports perpetual contracts for seven major US stocks, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla. Users can trade US stocks 24/7 using cryptocurrency as collateral, but the depth may decrease during non-trading hours.

In the long-term plan, Aster will also develop a dedicated Aster Layer 1 blockchain for on-chain derivative trading, providing exclusive infrastructure for on-chain derivative trading.

Ethereal

Ethereal is the first project natively built on the Ethena Network and is the "favorite son" project of the ENA community, supported by the USDe stablecoin at the underlying level. 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, bringing a fully functional spot and perpetual contract to the upcoming Ethena network. In terms of technical architecture, Ethereal uses the EVM solution, settlement through Converge, Arbitrum execution environment, and Celestia data availability layer. The order matching delay is less than 20 milliseconds, with a peak of about 1 million orders per second and 1,000 trades per second.

In terms of liquidity, Ethereal V1 aims to become the core place for on-chain USDe fund hedging and trading. The platform has received formal approval from Ethena governance (99.6% support rate) and has promised to allocate 15% of future governance tokens to ENA stakers (sENA), deeply aligning with community interests.

On June 20, 2025, Ethereal officially launched its testnet, and users can experience high-performance on-chain trading products supported by USDe via testnet.ethereal.trade.

Future, Ethereal will gradually launch various products including spot trading, lending, loans, RWA, and more derivative financial products based on USDe, continuing to expand the DeFi landscape.

Paradex

Paradex is incubated by the institutional liquidity platform Paradigm (unrelated to the name venture capital), built on the Ethereum Layer2 blockchain Paradex Network, which is based on the Starknet Stack, positioning itself as a high-performance decentralized trading and asset management platform.

Although the incubator is not the well-known top-tier crypto VC Paradigm, but the same-named institutional liquidity platform Paradigm, it is still worth attention.

Paradigm was founded in 2019, providing services to hedge funds, market makers, and family offices, and has extensive research in the crypto options and other derivative trading markets. Initially, its working model was to handle OTC matching, entrusting FTX and other exchanges with on-exchange execution, clearing, and settlement. At its peak, it captured 30% of the global crypto options market, raised $35 million at a $400 million valuation, led jointly by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.

However, after the collapse of FTX, Paradigm, as a partner, was also greatly affected, and after a sharp decline in trading volume, it launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.

Benefiting from its years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's feature is to support perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading, all unified in one account. Any asset can be used as collateral, supporting isolated, cross, and portfolio margin modes. In terms of fees, the taker fee is 0.03%, and the limit order (posting order) has a -0.005% rebate.

In terms of asset management, the Paradex treasury allows users to obtain LP tokens by shares and can combine mainstream DeFi like Pendle, Morpho, and Aave. The treasury supports active trading and passive returns from treasury trading funds (VTF), with some LP tokens able to be directly used as collateral to participate in more on-chain strategies in the future. Furthermore, the integrated lending market on Paradex allows users to lend directly from the same account and mortgage their investment portfolios.

Currently, Paradex has announced its token economics, and the community has an extremely strong expectation for its token launch. The future use of the platform token DIME will include paying for transaction fees, discounting fees, staking, liquidity mining rewards, and participating in governance/voting. Currently, Paradex is the number one options DEX in the cryptocurrency market, although its trading volume growth in perpetual contracts is not particularly outstanding.