Looking for the next UNI? A review of 5 promising upcoming Perp DEX projects to follow.

This is undoubtedly the biggest bull market of 2025.

Since November 29, 2024, after the Hyperliquid airdrop token triggered a frenzy across the internet, this track has completely entered the fast lane. As a new generation order book Perp DEX representative, the token HYPE once surged to $50 and has since stabilized around $47, becoming one of the most influential and wealth-generating projects of the year.

The Perp DEX track not only has high income, but also a large growth space, which has brought an unprecedented strong threat to CEX. The daily trading volume of crypto derivatives has long been 4-5 times that of spot, and the current penetration rate of the on-chain derivatives market is still less than 10%, indicating that there is at least more than 10 times growth potential in the future.

Just as there is never just one centralized exchange, more and more teams are starting to flock into the market. The ceiling of the industry is constantly rising, and competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Major projects are continuously upgrading their technology, liquidity, depth, user experience, and incentive mechanisms, all ramping up their efforts. The clustering of projects and the emergence of innovations have also brought about a stronger "wealth spillover" effect, attracting a large amount of funds and continuous attention from users, especially from the new batch of Perp DEX players that have not yet issued tokens.

Currently, the Hyperliquid Season 2 airdrop is about to launch, and other emerging projects with rapid growth, strong team backgrounds, and high expectations for token issuance are also emerging one after another. Rhythm BlockBeats will review five unlaunched Perp DEX dark horses—whether they are experiencing rapid growth, have abundant resources, or are backed by star VCs, these are key projects that the "farming" army and contract players cannot miss in this round.

edgeX

edgeX is one of the first projects launched by Amber Group's new accelerator incubator in July 2024, currently enjoying high popularity in the Korean community, and the experience of the mobile app is also quite 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 latency of less than 10 milliseconds, setting a new benchmark for speed and efficiency in decentralized derivatives exchanges. In terms of fees, Maker is 0.038% and Taker is 0.015%.

According to the latest data, EdgeX's actual revenue over the past 30 days reached $5.6 million, surpassing leading perpetual DEXs such as GMX ($2.45 million) and dYdX ($1.23 million). Projects that rank high in revenue have more genuine capital flow, and users' transaction fees are "real and substantial". (Hyperliquid, although having a larger trading volume, has not been included in DefiLlama's perpetual DEX comparison list due to its positioning as an independent chain. )

From the market depth perspective, edgeX currently performs the best among all Perp DEXs. Taking BTC/ETH as an example, under a 0.01% price spread, edgeX's BTC can support a position of 6 million dollars, surpassing hyperliquid (5 million), Aster (4 million), and Lighter (1 million). Although the overall depth is still slightly inferior to hyperliquid, in the vast majority of scenarios, edgeX is the best Perp DEX in terms of depth after hyperliquid.

Under a price spread of 0.01% at the order book, a comparison of BTC and ETH depth across different platforms.

On the team side, edgeX is backed by Amber Group, with top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, along with professionals from both the crypto and traditional finance sectors, boasting over 7 years of exchange operation and trading experience.

In addition, perhaps thanks to the resources of the incubator Amber Group, edgeX's market-making treasury has more strategy designs to help 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 bearing the responsibility of liquidating positions. Although statistics usually show positive returns over a quarterly cycle, the treasury still faces risks of unilateral market risk exposure, "bankruptcy", or vectors for capital shortage attacks.

Unlike the traditional "MM Vault", edgeX's eLP (Edge Liquidity Pool) combines passive liquidity and intelligent hedging mechanisms, ensuring that funds always provide depth to the order book and dynamically hedge large risk exposures. At the same time, the vault also features dynamic leverage adjustment and a dedicated insurance fund, which is adjusted in real-time based on profits/leverage to prevent malicious operations on large funds. 10% of each profit goes into the insurance pool to buffer against vault losses caused by extreme market conditions.

Next, edgeX will upgrade from the current perp app rollup (V1) to the high-performance financial chain (V2), supporting a fully modular and composable financial infrastructure.

Lighter

Lighter is a new Perp DEX in the Ethereum ecosystem, initially launched as a spot DEX on Arbitrum in 2023. In March 2024, it transitioned to a zksync layer 3 DEX, and in November, it evolved into a ZK Perp DEX, built on zk-rollup, similar to the mechanism of edgeX. On the technical level, it achieves 5 milliseconds of soft finality and a matching speed of 10,000 orders per second.

Although it is still invitation-only, Lighter's daily trading volume has stabilized between 1 billion and 2 billion USD, with a cumulative trading volume of 2.4 billion USD, second only to Hyperliquid, making it the fastest-growing Perp DEX.

One of the reasons for the rapid growth in Lighter's trading volume is its zero-fee model similar to Robinhood—both makers and takers are completely exempt from fees. However, correspondingly, while Lighter's trading volume is huge, due to its zero-fee (0-fee) model, there may be elements of wash trading within the trading volume, and the platform currently lacks a solid revenue model.

In terms of the 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, managed by professional traders, and profits are distributed based on the contribution ratio. Currently, there are no transaction fees as well. However, deposits in LLP no longer earn points rewards. Currently, Lighter's points are priced at 5 dollars each in the over-the-counter market.

On the team side, Lighter's founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski graduated from Harvard University and was an angel investor in Fabric Cryptography and Daimo, with a strong background. Institutional investors include top-tier capital such as a16z and Lightspeed Ventures.

Aster

Aster is an upgrade resulting from the merger of Astherus and APX on March 31, 2024. Originally focused on the liquidity of staked assets, it has now become one of the ways to enter the Perp DEX market under the Binance ecosystem. Aster is highly integrated with the BNB ecosystem, natively compatible with the Binance wallet, fully invested by YZi Labs, and has received strong support in terms of ecological resources and traffic, with multiple interactions and endorsements from CZ.

It's nice to lean against a big tree for shade, and against the backdrop of strong expectations for coin issuance, the trading volume of Aster has also grown rapidly, currently at 210 million dollars.

Aster supports two trading modes. The Simple mode aims for ultimate simplicity and ease of use; the Pro mode is aimed at professional users, with fees of 0.01% for Makers and 0.035% for Takers. In addition, Aster has innovatively launched the Dumb prediction game, allowing users to predict short-term asset fluctuations by the minute and place bets, offering a unique gameplay.

Unlike other Perp DEXs, Aster's liquidity is primarily supported by its own liquidity hub, without relying on external market-making teams. The TVL of the USDF stablecoin within the protocol has reached 130 million USD, while the TVL of asBNB (in collaboration with the BNB chain) is approximately 115 million USD.

Data Source: DefiLama

In addition, Aster is promoting the combination of US stocks and the contracts that are best suited for the cryptocurrency market. Currently, it supports perpetual contracts for 7 blue-chip US stocks including Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Users can trade US stocks 24/7 using cryptocurrency as margin, but the depth during non-trading hours may decrease.

In the long-term plan, Aster will also develop the Aster Layer 1 public chain specifically for on-chain derivatives trading, providing dedicated infrastructure for on-chain derivatives transactions.

Ethereal

Ethereal is the first project natively built on the Ethena Network and is considered the "child" project of the ENA community, supported by the USDe stablecoin. The goal is to create a one-stop, vertically integrated DeFi platform that fully unleashes the potential of USDe.

Ethereal V1 is the starting point of this vision, bringing a fully functional spot and perpetual contracts to the upcoming Ethena network. In terms of technical architecture, Ethereal adopts the EVM solution, with settlement through Converge, Arbitrum execution environment, and Celestia data availability layer. The order matching delay is less than 20 milliseconds, with a peak capacity of processing approximately 1 million orders and 1000 trades per second.

In terms of liquidity, Ethereal V1 is committed to becoming the core venue for on-chain USDe capital hedging and trading. The platform has obtained formal approval from Ethena governance (with a support rate of 99.6%) and has pledged to allocate 15% of future governance tokens to ENA stakers (sENA), deeply binding with community interests.

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

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

Paradex

Paradex is incubated by the crypto institution liquidity platform Paradigm (unrelated to the namesake venture capital) and is built on the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Paradex Network, which is constructed based on the Starknet Stack. This Layer 2 is positioned for high-performance decentralized trading and asset management.

Although the incubator is not the well-known top crypto VC Paradigm, but rather the liquidity platform Paradigm of the same name, it is still worth paying attention to.

Paradigm was founded in 2019, providing services to institutions such as hedge funds, market makers, and family offices, with extensive research in the derivatives trading market, including crypto options. Initially, its business model involved handling over-the-counter matchmaking, leaving on-exchange execution, clearing, and settlement to exchanges like FTX. At its peak, it held a 30% share of the global cryptocurrency options market, completing a $35 million funding round at a $400 million valuation, co-led by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.

However, after the collapse of FTX, Paradigm, as a partner, also suffered a significant impact, and after a rapid decline in trading volume, launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.

Thanks to years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex features support for perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading, all unified under a single account. Any asset can be used as collateral, supporting isolated, cross, and combined margin modes. In terms of fees, Paradex charges a maker fee of 0.03%, and limit orders (pending orders) receive a rebate of -0.005%.

In terms of asset management, the Paradex vault allows users to receive LP tokens based on their shares and can be combined with mainstream DeFi such as Pendle, Morpho, and Aave. The vault supports both active trading and passive income from vault trading funds (VTF). Some LP tokens may be used as collateral in the future to participate in more on-chain strategies. Additionally, the lending market integrated with Paradex allows users to borrow and lend directly using the same account, enabling portfolio collateralization.

Currently, Paradex has announced its tokenomics, and the community has exceptionally strong expectations for its token launch. The platform token DIME will have future uses including payment of trading fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, as well as participation in governance/voting. At present, Paradex is the top-ranked options DEX in the cryptocurrency space, although the trading volume on perpetual contracts has not seen particularly outstanding growth.