Behind the blazing success of Aster, the entire Perp DEX track is experiencing an unprecedented race. From technical innovation to user experience, from asset diversity to ecosystem integration, each project is seeking its own differentiation and breakout.

But perhaps the most important data is revenue data. From revenue data, these projects have already demonstrated their true blood generation capability.

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the current status of this track, we have compiled the top 5 most profitable Perp DEX projects that have not yet minted coins, to see how they have found their foothold in their respective niches and how they started.

(It is important to note that this article mainly selects and analyzes projects from the perspective of protocol revenue. Some well-known Perp DEX projects like Lighter, although performing well in terms of trading volume and user activity, are excluded from this analysis due to their fee model of charging zero fees and collecting an early closure fee, making revenue data difficult to calculate and therefore not included in this analysis).

1. edgeX ($49.47 million)

edgeX set a revenue record in the perpetual DEX field in September 2025, with a total cumulative 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 allowed it to capture approximately 15-20% market share in the intense perpetual DEX competition, becoming the revenue giant second only to Hyperliquid's PERP.

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. Of particular note, edgeX has demonstrated a competitive advantage surpassing its peers in terms of liquidity depth. Within a 0.01% price spread range, edgeX's BTC trading pair can support holdings of up to $6 million, a figure that surpasses Hyperliquid's $5 million, Aster's $4 million, and Lighter's $1 million, establishing its depth advantage in medium-scale trades.

As for the mobile experience, edgeX stands out. Its latest v2.9 mobile app integrates Privy MPC wallet technology, allowing users to start trading without having to remember complex mnemonic phrases, significantly lowering the barrier of entry to DeFi. The app also supports one-click recharge of USDC/Arbitrum, real-time push notifications for limit order execution, and one-click reverse positions and other professional trading functions. This design philosophy, which combines CEX-level user experience with DeFi security, has earned widespread recognition for edgeX in the mobile-first Asian market.

The success of edgeX is inseparable from its strong team background and strategic incubation support. As one of the first incubation projects launched by Amber Group in July 2024, the edgeX team has brought together veteran professionals from top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, with over 7 years of experience in exchange operation and product development. As a global digital asset management company that manages about $5 billion in assets, Amber Group has provided edgeX with professional market-making support and deep liquidity, which is also a key factor that has allowed the platform to achieve a depth of over $10 million in a short period of time.

In terms of global deployment, edgeX places special emphasis on expanding into the Asian market, especially the Korean market. Several community events were held during Korean Blockchain Week 2025, including the "edgeX CONNECTS ALL" Seoul Community Night and on-site trading competitions, which garnered high attention and participation from the Korean DeFi community. This localization strategy, combined with multilingual support and a mobile-first product design, has laid a solid foundation for edgeX to establish itself in the fiercely competitive Asian market.

According to community expectations, the TGE in Q4 2025 will bring generous rewards to token holders. Based on a 20-35% token distribution assumption, the estimated value of each token could be between $370 and $870. This expectation has driven explosive growth in platform user numbers and trading volume, with deposits in July even increasing by 1000%.

From an investment value perspective, edgeX has demonstrated rare self-sustainability, with its cumulative revenue of $49.47 million coming entirely from real transaction fees, rather than 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 (not related to the VC firm of the same name), is built on the Ethereum Layer2 blockchain Paradex Network built on the Starknet Stack, positioning this Layer2 for high-performance decentralized trading and asset management.

Although the incubator is not the well-known crypto top VC Paradigm, but the namesake crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm, it is still noteworthy.

Founded in 2019, Paradigm serves hedge funds, market makers, at-home offices, and other institutions, with a focus on the crypto options and other derivatives trading markets. Initially, its work involved OTC matching, with on-chain execution, clearing, and settlement handed over 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 investment from Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.

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

Benefiting from years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's standout feature is its support for 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 fee structure, Paradex has implemented an extremely competitive zero-fee model. Starting from September 10, 2025, the platform offers a completely free experience to UI traders with 0% maker fees and 0% taker fees on all perpetual markets (excluding BTC and ETH). For API traders, the platform charges 0% maker fees and 0.02% taker fees, effectively boosting the platform's trading activity.

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

In terms of asset management, Paradex's treasury allows users to obtain LP tokens on a share basis, which can be combined with mainstream DeFi projects such as Pendle, Morpho, Aave, and more. The treasury supports both active trading and passive income through Vaulted Trading Funds (VTF), with some LP tokens being directly usable as collateral in the future for participating in more on-chain strategies. Moreover, Paradex's integrated lending market allows users to borrow directly from the same account, using the portfolio as collateral.

Currently, Paradex has unveiled 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 trading fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, as well as participation in governance/voting.

In terms of market performance, Paradex has achieved total revenue of $9.74 million, with the revenue in the last 30 days reaching $1.28 million. Trading data shows a 30-day volume of $93.2 billion, a total trading volume of $836 billion, and a TVL of $92.74 million, demonstrating strong market performance.

3. Extended ($6 million)

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

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

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

Extended's success is largely attributed to its strong founding team background. CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov previously served as the Head of Cryptocurrency Business Operations at Revolut and a McKinsey consultant, bringing rich experience in crypto operations and strategic consulting. The CTO was an architect at four crypto exchanges, including the recently launched Revolut Crypto Exchange (Revolut X), while the CBO was the former Lead Engineer of Revolut Crypto and a key contributor to the Corda blockchain. The core motivation of this team stemmed from observing user pain points during their time at Revolut: retail users entered the crypto market during the 2021 bull run but faced a double dilemma of poor DeFi user experience and risks from centralized exchanges (such as FTX's collapse).

On April 30, 2024, Extended completed a $6.5 million seed round, attracting top-tier investment firms and well-known angel investors in the Web3 space. Lead investor Tioga Capital Partners is a European VC firm focused on Web3 investments known for supporting exceptional European blockchain entrepreneurs. Co-investors include Brussels-based Semantic Ventures, fintech and Web3-focused Cherry Ventures, and StarkWare itself participating both as a technology partner and investor. The lineup of angel investors is equally impressive, including Lido Co-founder Konstantin Lomashuk and several former Revolut executives.

4. Ostium ($4.48M)

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, providing users with 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 in-house developed pull-based oracle, with node operation and data aggregation handled by the Stork Network; for crypto assets, it employs Chainlink Data Streams. The cleverness of this design lies in the fact that oracle metadata (such as bid-ask spreads, market trade timestamps, etc.) is only written on-chain when needed for settlement, reducing Gas fees and maintaining sub-second latency response.

Regarding 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 only settles traders' P&L when the separate liquidity buffer is depleted, meaning liquidity providers are not the default counterparties for trades, significantly reducing directional risk. The fee allocation mechanism is also carefully designed: 30% of the opening fee plus 100% of the liquidation reward and extension fee when undercollateralized all go to OLP holders. Users can also opt to lock deposits (up to 365 days) to receive a "lockup bonus" for a larger share of fee distribution.

In the liquidation mechanism design, Ostium employs a hyperbolic funding rate and skewness-based opening fees to dynamically suppress one-sided positions. The 100% liquidation reward goes to the LP treasury, ensuring timely closure incentives alignment. The entire perpetual contract engine runs entirely on the Arbitrum chain for matching and settlement, without any proprietary off-chain sequencer, ensuring decentralization.

The founding team at 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, where she collaborated with Co-CIO Bob Prince on commodity research, and has worked on growth stock valuation research at McKinsey's Berlin office and Verdad Advisers. Based on her innovative contributions to bringing real-world asset perpetual contracts onto on-chain trading, Kaledora was selected as a member of Forbes' 2025 Financial 30 Under 30 list.

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Marco Antonio Ribeiro is currently pursuing a dual 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 on the Commodities team, focusing on macro strategy and global market analysis. Marco has notable achievements in academia and technology, having won 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 College Entrepreneurship Association and serves as the President of the student-run economic research nonprofit 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 fluctuations due to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Their frustration with the inability to easily access small-scale futures positions sparked the innovative concept of a synthetic perpetual contract model.

Ostium Labs closed a $3.5 million seed round of financing on October 6, 2023, marking the company's only publicly disclosed funding round to date. This round was led by marquee venture capital firms General Catalyst and LocalGlobe, with participating institutions including Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Vessel Capital, DeFi Alliance, among others. The roster of angel investors is equally impressive, featuring industry luminaries such as former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, LedgerPrime Chief Investment Officer Shiliang Tang, Nick van Eck, Neel Somani, and more. Notably, the company has not disclosed specific valuation information to date, nor has it undertaken additional equity or token financing rounds.

According to the latest on-chain data analysis, the Ostium protocol has demonstrated robust growth momentum. As of September 15, 2025, the protocol's Total Value Locked (TVL) reached $44.37 million, with a total trading 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 revenue of $4.48 million, with $0.7225 million in revenue over the last 30 days and a TVL of $52.9 million. The platform has effectively driven user growth through a 24-week continuous rewards program, showcasing strong potential for growth in the RWA perpetual trading subsector.

Ostium has not yet issued its native token, and the team has not confirmed a specific token release schedule. The current incentive mechanism mainly relies on a weekly points plan (a 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 gone through a private alpha testing phase starting 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 its public testnet Beta version on Arbitrum, providing phased access to over 80,000 waitlisted users. The upcoming milestones include gradually 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 space through its unique hybrid architecture design. The platform adopts a "off-chain order aggregation + on-chain settlement" technical solution, maintaining decentralized characteristics while achieving centralized exchange-level execution efficiency. The platform supports up to 25x leverage trading and has successfully deployed on over 14 blockchain networks including Ethereum, zkSync Era, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, among others.

The technological innovation core of Satori Finance lies in its design concept of a hybrid order book model. The platform provides near-centralized exchange execution speed through an off-chain order aggregation matching mechanism while ensuring transaction transparency and decentralized characteristics through on-chain settlement. This design scheme, in collaboration with an external market maker network, has built a central limit order book system with deep liquidity. In terms of fee structure, Satori Finance demonstrates a 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 CTO George Wu previously served as a stock, interest rate, and commodity derivatives trader at the global leading market maker Optiver for four years, laying a solid foundation for the platform's tech architecture and risk management system. Co-founder and CEO Rahim Noorani brings rich investment banking and venture capital experience, having served as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and later as an investor at Scale Ventures, providing crucial guidance for the platform's business strategy development.

On the funding side, Satori Finance successfully completed a $10 million seed round in May 2022, receiving support from top institutions in the cryptocurrency investment space. This round was led by Polychain Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participating investors including Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Portal, Acala, Astar, Parallel, Clover, among other well-known backers. Particularly noteworthy is the involvement of Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood as a strategic advisor in this funding round.

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

The platform's revenue growth trajectory is also impressive. Starting from $10,400 in fee revenue in Q3 2023, the revenue reached $1.15 million in Q2 2025, with the current total revenue standing at $2.76 million.

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