Behind the fervor of Aster, the entire Perp DEX track is undergoing an unprecedented competitive race. From technical innovation to user experience, from asset diversity to ecosystem integration, each project is seeking its own path to differentiation.

But perhaps the most important data of all is revenue data. From revenue data, these projects have already demonstrated their real moneymaking ability.

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the current state of this track, we have compiled the top 5 most profitable pre-mined Perp DEX projects to see how they have found their footing in their respective niches and how they got started.

(It is worth noting that this article primarily selects and analyzes projects from the protocol revenue perspective. Some well-known Perp DEX projects such as Lighter, although performing well in terms of trading volume and user activity, are not included in this analysis scope as they adopt a fee model of charging 0 fees and collecting an early closure fee, making it difficult to calculate revenue data.)

1. edgeX ($49.47 million)

edgeX set a revenue record in the perpetual DEX space in September 2025, with a total revenue of $49.47 million, firmly holding the industry's second position. In just the past 30 days, the platform has generated $20.46 million in revenue, achieving a staggering 147% growth compared to the second quarter's $8.29 million quarterly revenue. This performance not only propelled edgeX towards an annualized revenue of $250 million but also positioned it with approximately a 15-20% market share in the intense perpetual DEX competition, becoming the revenue giant second only to Hyperliquid in the PERP realm.

In terms of technical architecture, edgeX is built on StarkWare's StarkEx zero-knowledge proof rollup technology, achieving a processing capacity of 200,000 orders per second and a matching latency of less than 10 milliseconds, directly challenging the technological moat of centralized exchanges. More notably, edgeX has demonstrated a competitive advantage surpassing peers in liquidity depth. Within a 0.01% price spread range, edgeX's BTC trading pair can support holdings of up to $6 million, surpassing Hyperliquid's $5 million, Aster's $4 million, and Lighter's $1 million, establishing its depth advantage in medium-scale trades.

When it comes to mobile experience, edgeX is truly unique. Its latest v2.9 mobile app has integrated Privy MPC wallet technology, allowing users to start trading without having to remember complex mnemonic phrases, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for DeFi. The app also supports one-click deposit for USDC/Arbitrum, real-time push notifications for limit order execution, and professional trading features like one-click position reversal. This design philosophy, which combines CEX-level user experience with DeFi security, has earned edgeX widespread recognition in the mobile-first Asian market.

The success of edgeX is attributed to its strong team background and strategic incubation support. As one of the inaugural incubation projects launched by Amber Group in July 2024, the edgeX team consists of senior professionals from top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, with over 7 years of experience in exchange operations and product development. Amber Group, a global digital asset firm managing around $50 billion in assets, provides edgeX with professional market-making support and deep liquidity, which is a key factor in the platform achieving over $10 million in depth in a short period of time.

In terms of global expansion, edgeX particularly emphasizes market development in Asia, especially in the South Korean market. During Korean Blockchain Week 2025, several community events were held, including the "edgeX CONNECTS ALL" Seoul community night and on-site trading competitions, garnering high attention and participation in the Korean DeFi community. This localization strategy, coupled with multilingual support and mobile-first product design, has laid a solid foundation for edgeX to establish itself in the competitive Asian market.

According to community expectations, the TGE in Q4 2025 is expected to bring substantial rewards to token holders. Based on a 20-35% token distribution assumption, the estimated valuation per token could range from $37 to $87. This expectation has driven explosive growth in platform user numbers and trading volume, with a deposit growth reaching as high as 1000% in July.

From an investment value perspective, edgeX has demonstrated remarkable self-sustainability, with its $49.47 million in cumulative revenue coming entirely from real transaction fees, not token inflation or external subsidies. This sustainable business model, combined with its leading advantages in technology, user experience, and market expansion.

2. Paradex ($9.74 million)

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 for high-performance decentralized trading and asset management.

Although the incubator is not a well-known crypto top-tier VC like Paradigm, but rather a liquidity platform of the same name in the crypto space, it is equally noteworthy.

Founded in 2019, Paradigm serves hedge funds, market makers, and prop shops, with a long-standing focus on the crypto options and other derivatives trading markets. Initially, its modus operandi involved handling over-the-counter matching and delegating on-exchange execution, clearing, and settlement to exchanges like FTX. At its peak, it held a 30% share of the global crypto options market, raised $35 million in funding at a $400 million valuation, with investments led by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.

However, after the collapse of FTX, Paradigm, as a partner, also suffered a significant blow, and following a drastic drop in trading volume, it launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.

Benefiting from its years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's hallmark is its support for perpetual swaps, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot markets, all unified in a single account, with any asset eligible as collateral, supporting isolated, cross, and portfolio margin modes.

In terms of fee structure, Paradex has implemented an extremely competitive zero-fee model. Starting from September 10, 2025, the platform offers a completely free experience with 0% maker fees and 0% taker fees for UI traders on all perpetual markets (excluding BTC and ETH). For API traders, the platform charges 0% maker fees and 0.02% taker fees, a strategy that has effectively boosted the platform's trading activity.

By building a private Starknet instance, the team used the Cairo programming language to write the business logic and successfully deployed a blockchain in just a 6-month development cycle. This customized solution has brought significant advantages, including a custom fee model, throughput reaching the level of centralized exchanges, and efficient batch order processing capability.

In terms of asset management, Paradex's treasury allows users to earn LP tokens pro-rata and combine mainstream DeFi projects such as Pendle, Morpho, Aave, etc. The treasury supports both active trading and passive income brought by the Treasury Fund Vehicle (TFV), with some LP tokens potentially being directly used as collateral in the future for participation in more on-chain strategies. Moreover, the integrated lending market supports users in borrowing directly from the same account, with the ability to collateralize a portfolio.

Currently, Paradex has unveiled its tokenomics, and the community has exceptionally high expectations for its token issuance. The platform's token DIME's future utilities will include payment of transaction fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, as well as participation in governance/voting.

In terms of market performance, Paradex has accumulated revenue of 9.74 million USD, with a revenue of 1.28 million USD in the last 30 days. Transaction data shows a 30-day trading volume of 93.2 billion USD, accumulated trading volume of 836 billion USD, and a Total Value Locked (TVL) of 92.74 million USD, demonstrating a robust market performance.

3. Extended (6 million USD)

As a rising star in the perpetual DEX space, Extended has achieved remarkable financial performance in just over a year. Based on its accumulated trading volume of 206.35 billion USD and standard fee structure, Extended's estimated accumulated revenue has reached 6-10 million USD, with a 30-day revenue of approximately 1.5-2.5 million USD. Although the platform has not yet implemented revenue tracking on major data aggregators like DefiLlama, the revenue estimate is relatively conservative and in line with industry standards, based on its 0.025% Taker fee and 0% Maker fee (high-volume users can receive up to a 0.02% rebate).

The platform's most notable innovation is its seamless integration design of "Frontend EVM, Backend Starknet." Users can trade directly using EVM wallets such as MetaMask, without the need to install a Starknet wallet or undergo complex cross-chain bridging operations. Deposits and withdrawals can be made on six major EVM chains, including Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base, BSC, Avalanche, and Polygon, with all trade settlements taking place on Starknet. This design not only aggregates around 80% of DeFi liquidity in the EVM ecosystem but also provides users with a nearly frictionless cross-chain trading experience.

Extended's Starknet migration, launched on August 12, 2025, is considered one of the most successful technical upgrade cases in DeFi history. The entire migration process was divided into three stages, lasting about a month, with users not needing to manually withdraw funds as all migrations were automatic. In the first stage, both systems ran in parallel, but rewards only accumulated on Starknet, effectively incentivizing early adopters of the migration. The second stage transitioned StarkEx to a liquidation-only mode, while the third stage completely shut down StarkEx and force-closed all remaining positions.

Extended's success is largely attributed to its strong founding team background. CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov previously served as the Director of Cryptocurrency Operations at Revolut and as a McKinsey consultant, bringing extensive experience in crypto operations and strategic consulting. The CTO was a former architect at four cryptocurrency exchanges, including the recently launched Revolut Crypto Exchange (Revolut X), while the CBO was the former Chief Engineer of Revolut Crypto and a key contributor to the Corda blockchain. The core motivation of this team stems from the pain points they observed during their time at Revolut: retail users entering the crypto market during the 2021 bull run but facing a dual dilemma of poor DeFi experiences and risks associated with centralized exchanges (such as FTX's potential collapse).

Extended completed a $6.5 million seed round of funding on April 30, 2024, attracting top-tier investment firms and well-known angel investors in the Web3 space. The lead investor, Tioga Capital Partners, is a European venture capital firm focused on Web3 investments, known for supporting outstanding European blockchain entrepreneurs. Co-investors include Semantic Ventures from Brussels, focusing on fintech and Web3, Cherry Ventures, and StarkWare, which participated both as a technology partner and investor. The lineup of angel investors is equally impressive, including Lido co-founder Konstantin Lomashuk and several former senior executives from Revolut.

4. Ostium ($4.48 million)

Ostium Labs is a decentralized protocol focused on synthetic perpetual contract trading of real-world assets (RWA), founded by Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro in 2022. The platform is built on the Arbitrum blockchain, offering users high leverage on-chain trading services for traditional assets such as stocks, commodities, forex, and indices, supporting leverage of up to 200x.

The protocol adopts a dual oracle architecture: for real-world assets, it uses Ostium's proprietary pull-based oracle, with node operation and data aggregation handled by the Stork Network; for crypto assets, it leverages Chainlink Data Streams. The clever design of this architecture ensures that oracle metadata (such as bid-ask spreads and market trade timestamps) is only written on-chain when needed for settlement, reducing gas fees and maintaining sub-second latency in response.

In terms of liquidity provision, Ostium has designed a unique OLP Treasury model. Liquidity providers deposit USDC into the market maker treasury and receive fungible OLP tokens. A key innovation is that the treasury settles traders' P&L only when the independent liquidity buffer is insufficient, meaning liquidity providers are not the default counterparty to trades, significantly reducing directional risk. The fee allocation mechanism is also carefully designed: 30% of the opening fee, along with 100% of the liquidation reward and extension fee in case of undercollateralization, all go to OLP holders. Users can also choose to lock deposits (up to 365 days) to receive a "lockup bonus" for a larger share of fee allocation.

In the design of the liquidation mechanism, Ostium adopts a hyperbolic funding rate and skewness-based opening fee to dynamically suppress one-way positions. 100% of the liquidation reward belongs to the LP treasury, ensuring incentive alignment for timely liquidation. The entire perpetual contract engine operates fully on the Arbitrum chain for matching and settlement, without a proprietary off-chain sequencer, preserving decentralization.

The founding team of Ostium Labs demonstrates a rare combination of cross-disciplinary professional backgrounds. CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn holds a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Harvard University with a minor in Statistics, previously interned at the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, collaborated with Co-CIO Bob Prince on commodity research, and has worked in growth equity valuation research at McKinsey's Berlin office and Verdad Advisers. Based on her innovative contributions to bringing real-world assets into on-chain perpetual trading, Kaledora was selected as a member of Forbes' 2025 Under 30 in Finance list.

Co-Founder and CTO Marco Antonio Ribeiro is currently pursuing a degree in Engineering Sciences and Economics at Harvard University (currently on leave for entrepreneurship). He also has experience at Bridgewater Associates, serving as an Investment Associate for the commodity team focusing on macro strategy and global market analysis. Marco has excelled academically and technically, winning the 2019 Harvard Hackathon UC Challenge, a Bronze Medal at the 30th International Biology Olympiad, and an Honorable Mention at the 50th International Physics Olympiad. He is also a Co-Founder of the Harvard Ventures and serves as the President of the student economics research non-profit organization Erevna.

The two founders met at Harvard University and began building Ostium in a hacker house in Cambridge during a period of intense commodity price swings due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Their frustration with the inability to easily obtain small-scale futures positions sparked the innovative concept of a synthetic perpetual contract model.

Ostium Labs completed a $3.5 million seed funding round on October 6, 2023, marking the company's only publicly disclosed funding round to date. This round was led by renowned venture capital firms General Catalyst and LocalGlobe, with participating institutions including Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Vessel Capital, DeFi Alliance, among others. The angel investor lineup is equally strong, including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, LedgerPrime CIO Shiliang Tang, Nick van Eck, Neel Somani, and other industry figures. It is worth noting that the company has not disclosed specific valuation information to date and has not pursued additional equity or token funding rounds.

According to the latest on-chain data analysis, the Ostium Protocol has shown a strong growth momentum. As of September 15, 2025, the protocol's Total Value Locked (TVL) reached $44.37 million, with a total transaction volume exceeding $17.8 billion. In terms of user activity, there were 845 daily active users in the past 24 hours, 2,225 weekly active users in the past 7 days, and 903 monthly active users.

Looking at revenue performance, Ostium Labs has accumulated $4.48 million in revenue, with a revenue of $722,500 in the last 30 days and a TVL of $52.9 million. The platform has effectively driven user growth through a continuous 24-week points program, demonstrating strong potential in the RWA perpetual trading segment.

Ostium has not yet issued a native token, and the team has not confirmed a specific token release plan. The current incentive mechanism primarily relies on the weekly points program (minimum of 500,000 points per week), rewarding transactions, liquidity provision, and referral activities. Users generally see this as a potential token airdrop prelude mechanism.

In terms of product development roadmap, Ostium has undergone a transition starting from a private alpha testing phase in Q4 2024, where the core tech stack was rebuilt to support long-tail real-world assets due to oracle constraints. On March 18, 2025, the protocol launched the public testnet Beta version on Arbitrum, providing phased access to over 80,000 waitlisted users. The upcoming milestones include progressively expanding the asset list (such as oil, copper, platinum, Hang Seng Index, etc.), completing third-party audits and officially launching the mainnet, and introducing a second treasury to separate market-making and settlement functions.

5. Satori Finance ($2.76 million)

Founded in 2021, Satori Finance has carved out a space in the competitive DeFi derivatives arena through its unique hybrid architecture design. The platform adopts a "Layer-1 Order Aggregation + Layer-2 Settlement" technical solution, achieving centralized exchange-level execution efficiency while maintaining decentralization. It supports up to 25x leverage trading and has been successfully deployed on over 14 blockchain networks including Ethereum, zkSync Era, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, and more.

The core technological innovation of Satori Finance lies in its design concept of a hybrid order book model. The platform provides near-centralized exchange execution speed through off-chain order aggregation matching, while ensuring transaction transparency and decentralization through on-chain settlement. This design scheme collaborates deeply with external market maker networks, establishing a central limit order book system with deep liquidity. In terms of fee structure, Satori Finance demonstrates significant competitive advantage, with Maker/Taker fees as low as 0.02% and 0.04% in its V2 version.

The founding team of Satori Finance has extensive experience in both traditional finance and the cryptocurrency industry. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer George Wu previously spent four years at the global leading market maker Optiver as a stock, interest rate, and commodity derivatives trader, laying a solid foundation for the platform's technical architecture and risk management system. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Rahim Noorani brings rich investment banking and venture capital experience, having worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and later as an investor at Scale Ventures, providing key guidance for the platform's business strategy development.

In terms of funding, Satori Finance successfully raised a $10 million seed round in May 2022, with support from top institutions in the cryptocurrency investment field. The round was led by Polychain Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from notable investors such as Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Portal, Acala, Astar, Parallel, Clover, among others. It is worth mentioning that Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood also participated in this round of funding as a strategic advisor.

Looking at the latest on-chain data, Satori Finance has shown a robust growth trend in trading volume. The platform's 24-hour perpetual contract trading volume reached $211 million, 7-day volume was $1.402 billion, 30-day volume amounted to $5.75 billion, and the cumulative historical trading volume has surpassed $97.123 billion. In terms of Total Value Locked (TVL) distribution, the platform's total TVL is $2.23 million, with zkSync Era chain holding the largest share at $1.31 million.

The platform's revenue growth trajectory is also impressive. Starting from $10.4 thousand in fee revenue in Q3 2023, reaching $1.15 million in Q2 2025, the current total revenue is $2.76 million.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia