This is undoubtedly the major race track of 2025.

Since November 29, 2024, when Hyperliquid airdropped its token and set the entire network on fire, this race track has completely entered the fast lane. As the next-generation order book Perp DEX representative, the HYPE token price spiked to $50 and has since stabilized around $47, becoming one of the most appealing and wealth-effect projects of the year.

The Perp DEX race track not only has high income but also huge growth potential, posing an unprecedented threat to CEX. The daily trading volume of crypto derivatives has long been 4-5 times that of spot, and the on-chain derivatives market penetration rate is currently less than 10%, implying at least a more than 10x growth potential in the future.

Just as there is never only one centralized exchange, more and more teams have begun to join the race track, raising the ceiling of the track continuously, intensifying the competition. Major projects continue to upgrade in technology, liquidity, depth, user experience, and incentive mechanisms, with many stepping up their game. The clustering of projects and frequent innovations have also brought a stronger "wealth spillover" effect, attracting a large amount of funds and continuous user attention, especially a new batch of unreleased Perp DEX players.

Currently, the second season airdrop of Hyperliquid is about to start, and some other rapidly growing, strong team background, and highly anticipated new projects have also emerged. This article by BlockBeats will list five unreleased key Perp DEX dark horses – they are either growing rapidly, well-funded, or backed by A-list VCs, all key projects that the current "degen" army and contract players cannot afford to miss.

edgeX

edgeX is the first batch of projects incubated by the new accelerator launched by Amber Group in July 2024. It is currently highly popular in the Korean community, and the mobile app experience is also good.

As a Perp DEX built on StarkEx ZK-Rollup on Ethereum Layer2, edgeX can process 200,000 orders per second, with an order matching latency of less than 10 milliseconds, setting a new speed and efficiency benchmark for decentralized derivative exchanges. The fees are 0.038% for Maker and 0.015% for Taker.

According to the latest data, edgex's actual revenue in the past 30 days reached $5.6 million, surpassing GMX ($2.45 million) and dYdX ($1.23 million) and other top perp DEXs. Projects ranking high in revenue have more genuine fund flows, where user transaction fees are "as real as it gets." (Although Hyperliquid has higher trading volume, it is not included in the perp DEX comparison list by DefiLlama due to its positioning as an independent chain)

Looking at market depth, edgeX currently performs the best among all Perp DEXs. Taking BTC/ETH as an example, at a 0.01% spread, edgeX's BTC can support a $6 million position, surpassing Hyperliquid ($5 million), Aster ($4 million), and Lighter ($1 million). Although the overall depth is slightly lower than Hyperliquid, in most scenarios, edgeX has the best depth among Perp DEXs except Hyperliquid.

Comparison of BTC and ETH depth across platforms at a 0.01% spread

On the team front, edgeX is backed by Amber Group, with top-tier industry professionals from institutions like J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, with over 7 years of exchange operation and trading experience.

Furthermore, perhaps benefiting from Amber Group's incubation, edgeX's liquidity pool has more strategic designs to help improve fund efficiency and risk management. In a typical Perp DEX structure, the pool acts as a central liquidity pool responsible for market-making and position liquidation. While quarterly revenue statistics often show positive returns, the pool still faces risks of exposure to one-sided market movements, "bankruptcy," or fund depletion attacks.

Unlike the traditional "MM Vault," edgeX's eLP (Edge Liquidity Pool) combines passive liquidity and intelligent hedging mechanisms, providing continuous depth to the order book and dynamically hedging large position risks. Additionally, the pool has dynamic leverage adjustments and a dedicated insurance fund that adjusts real-time based on profit/leverage to prevent malicious large fund operations. 10% of each profit goes into the insurance pool to cushion losses from extreme market conditions affecting the pool.

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

Lighter

Lighter is a cutting-edge Perp DEX in the Ethereum ecosystem, initially launched as a spot DEX on Arbitrum in 2023, transformed into a zksync layer3 DEX in March 2024, and further evolved into a ZK Perp DEX in November, built on zk-rollup, similar to edgeX's mechanism. Technically, it has achieved 5ms soft finality and a matching speed of 10,000 trades per second.

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

One of the reasons for Lighter's rapid trading volume growth is its Robinhood-like zero-fee model—both makers and takers are completely fee-free. However, correspondingly, due to its zero-fee model, which may include elements of wash trading in the trading volume, Lighter currently lacks a solid revenue model.

In terms of protocol mechanism, Lighter has a native liquidity mining pool (LLP) similar to Hyperliquid's HLP. LLP allows retail investors to inject funds into a public liquidity pool managed by professional traders and share profits based on their contribution ratios, also currently fee-free. However, deposits to LLP no longer receive yield farming rewards. Currently, Lighter's LP tokens are priced at $5 each in the OTC market.

On the team side, Lighter's founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski is a Harvard graduate, a former angel investor in Fabric Cryptography and Daimo, with a strong background. Institutional investors include a16z, Lightspeed Ventures, and other top-tier capital.

Aster

Aster emerged on March 31, 2024, through the merger and upgrade of Astherus and APX, originally focusing on staked assets' liquidity and now serving as one of Binance's entry points into the Perp DEX market. Aster is deeply integrated with the BNB ecosystem, natively compatible with the Binance wallet, fully invested by YZi Labs, with multiple interactions with CZ, exhibiting strong ecosystem resources and traffic support.

With the strong background of being on a rising coin, Aster's trading volume has also grown rapidly, currently standing at $210 million.

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

Unlike other Perp DEX treasuries, most of Aster's liquidity is supported by its own liquidity hub, without relying on an external market-making team. The protocol's USDF stablecoin TVL has reached $130 million, and the asBNB (in partnership with the BNB chain) TVL is around $115 million.

Data Source: DefiLama

Furthermore, Aster is advancing the integration of US stocks with the contract expertise of the crypto world. It currently supports perpetual contracts for 7 blue-chip US stocks such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Users can trade US stocks 24/7 using cryptocurrency as collateral, but the depth during non-trading hours may decrease.

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

Ethereal

Ethereal is the first project native to the Ethena Network and is also the "brainchild" project of the ENA community. Supported by the USDe stablecoin at its core, its goal is to create an all-in-one, vertically integrated DeFi platform, fully unleashing the potential of USDe.

Ethereal V1 is the starting point for this vision, bringing fully-featured spot and perpetual contracts to the upcoming Ethena Network. In terms of technical architecture, Ethereal adopts the EVM approach, with settlement through Converge, an Arbitrum execution environment, and Celestia data availability layer, achieving sub-20ms order matching latency, able to process around 1 million orders and 1,000 trades per second at peak.

In terms of liquidity, Ethereal V1 is committed to being a core venue for on-chain USDe liquidity provision and trading. The platform has received formal approval from Ethena governance (99.6% support) and has pledged 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, allowing users to experience high-performance on-chain trading products backed by USDe through testnet.ethereal.trade.

In the future, Ethereal will gradually introduce a range of USDe-based derivative financial products, including spot trading, lending, borrowing, RWA, and more, to further expand the DeFi landscape.

Paradex

Paradex, incubated by the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm (unrelated to the venture capital firm of the same name), is built on the Ethereum Layer2 blockchain Paradex Network based on the Starknet Stack, aiming to provide high-performance decentralized trading and asset management.

Although the incubating entity is not the well-known crypto top-tier VC Paradigm but rather the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm with the same name, it is equally noteworthy.

Founded in 2019, Paradigm provides services to hedge funds, market makers, and family offices, among other institutions, with a long-standing research presence in the cryptocurrency options and derivatives trading markets. Initially, its operating model involved handling over-the-counter matching, delegating on-exchange execution, clearing, and settlement to exchanges like FTX. At its peak, it held a 30% share of the global cryptocurrency options market, raised $35 million at a $400 million valuation, with Jump Crypto and Alameda Research co-leading the investment.

However, following FTX's collapse, Paradigm, as a partner, also faced significant setbacks, and after a rapid decline in trading volume, it launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.

Benefiting from its years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's distinctive features include support for perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading, all unified under one account. Any asset can be used as collateral, supporting isolated, cross, and portfolio margin modes. In terms of fees, Paradex charges a maker fee of 0.03%, and limit orders (post-only orders) receive a rebate of -0.005%.

In terms of asset management, the Paradex Vault allows users to acquire LP tokens on a pro-rata basis and to compose mainstream DeFi assets such as Pendle, Morpho, Aave, among others. The Vault supports both active trading and passive income generated through the Vault Trading Fund (VTF). Some LP tokens can be directly used as collateral in the future to participate in more on-chain strategies. Furthermore, the integrated lending market on Paradex enables users to borrow directly from the same account, where the collateral can be a composed investment portfolio.

Currently, Paradex has revealed its tokenomics, and the community's anticipation for its token issuance is exceptionally strong. The platform's native token, DIME, will have future use cases including payment of transaction fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, as well as participation in governance/voting. Presently, Paradex is the leading options DEX in the cryptocurrency space, although its trading volume on perpetual contracts is not particularly outstanding.

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