2026 is destined to be the year of the Perp DEX airdrop.

From Hyperliquid, Aster, to the recent TGE of Lighter, every Perp DEX launched in this cycle has had a festive airdrop. After Lighter concluded, second-tier Perp DEXs also began to see a significant increase in activity. According to data from perpetualpulse, some of the top trading volume Perp DEXs that have not yet launched their tokens include edgeX, Variational, Extended, GRVT, and Paradex.

In the new year, the competition among Perp DEXs has entered a more intense stage. From trading volume to various activities and incentives, even project teams have started mudslinging. Faced with various Perp DEX scoring mechanisms and strategies, how can ordinary users choose? How can they maximize scoring weight with limited funds? How can they avoid getting rugged?

In this article, BlockBeats will take a look at four popular second-tier Perp DEXs in the market—Variational, Extended, Paradex, StandX—from the perspectives of team background, core mechanism, data performance, and interaction strategy, analyze their differences and characteristics comprehensively, and provide some summary content based on the practical experience of community KOLs.

Variational

Variational Omni is one of the products that the editor has been paying close attention to.

Since the combination of open liquidation refunds, Kaito Yaps rewards, and the points system, Variational's data has been soaring: as of December 26, 2025, the cumulative spread income reached $7.6 million; as of January 3, 2026, the cumulative trading volume exceeded $1 trillion. There have also been many discussions on trading and scoring strategies on CT, such as posts by dTfN (@deTEfabulaNar_) and Tony (@T0nyCrypt0).

The Variational team has a solid background, with the two core founders being Columbia University alumni who previously co-founded a quantitative trading firm that was acquired by Genesis Trading. After leaving Genesis in 2021, the two founded Variational and have been continuously iterating on machine learning, quantitative market making, and decentralized derivative design. In 2024, Variational completed a $10.3 million seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners, with follow-on investments from Coinbase Ventures and Dragonfly Capital.

For Lucas and Edward, who experienced the FTX incident firsthand, amplifying into a systemic impact during extreme market conditions is a problem that needs to be addressed, and it is also the design philosophy behind Variational. In July 2025, Edward was a guest on the 'Flirting with Models' podcast, where he elaborated on the idea of 'How OTC Derivatives Can Go On-Chain' — a deep dive where he integrated a Bayesian framework, market-making game theory, and on-chain mechanisms. His personal website quant.am and Lucas's website lucasschuermann.com continue to update relevant research. More background on the team can be found in a previous article by the author, "How does Columbia-produced, zero-fee Variational generate revenue?," so it will not be further elaborated here.

What the author wants to emphasize here is how to understand Variational's spread mechanism and arbitrage logic from the perspective of its product features to enhance and optimize trading strategies.

Although Variational and Lighter are both zero-fee, their profit mechanisms are completely different: Lighter charges market maker fees, while Variational profits through the spread arbitrage mechanism via the Omni Liquidity Provider. (The spread is the price difference between the buying and selling prices, serving as the trading cost for users. The smaller the spread, the lower the trading cost.)

Simply put, on Variational there is only one liquidity provider, which is Variational itself. When a user places an order, Variational internally acts as the sole liquidity provider and counterparty, charging a spread of 4-6 basis points, while simultaneously hedging by opening a reverse position on external trading platforms to capture the price difference between internal and external trades as profit. Many traders have also verified this core logic through various control group tests: the larger the spread, the higher Variational's profit and the greater the weight of rewards received by users. So how to maximize the reward weight? A straightforward strategy is that the larger the spread, the better. So how to increase the spread?

Based on the principles discussed earlier, we know that the ways to reduce the spread are: trade mainstream currencies, such as BTC or ETH; choose time periods with good liquidity.

Conversely, the ways to increase the spread are: trade small altcoins, where the spread is larger than that of mainstream currencies; additionally, opt for periods of low liquidity, such as weekends or Asian nighttime. This way, the weight will be relatively higher. On this basis, you can further increase trading volume data by increasing the number of trades, holding period, single trade amount, and so on.

Through these methods, you can achieve a higher reward weight for the same trading volume, thereby securing a more advantageous position in the airdrop distribution.

Extended

Extended, often mentioned together with Variational, along with Perp DEX, is used in many arbitrage strategies.

Extended is a Perp DEX with a strong traditional finance background, with team members mostly from Revolut, a European fintech unicorn valued at $75 billion. Extended's CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov previously led Revolut's crypto business operations, having also worked as a McKinsey consultant; the CTO served as an architect for four crypto exchanges, including Revolut; the CBO was a former Revolut crypto lead engineer and a Corda blockchain contributor.

This Perp DEX built by the former Revolut team has completed a $6.5 million financing round led by StarkWare, with angel investors including Revolut executives and Lido co-founder Konstantin Lomashuk. In August 2025, Extended officially launched on the Starkex mainnet and later migrated to Starknet. As of January 6, 2026, the accumulated trading volume reached $108.6 billion, TVL was $142 million, and open interest was $206 million.

The product design of Extended currently looks quite solid, covering not only mainstream cryptocurrencies but also six TradFi assets: S&P 500, Nasdaq stock indices, EUR/USD forex, precious metals gold and silver, and commodity oil. From the OI distribution, gold trading has always been in the top 5 of Extended, indicating that TradFi assets do have significant real demand.

In addition, Extended also has a highlight in the design of its vault, Extended Vault Shares (XVS). Currently, up to 75% of the XVS balance can be directly counted as collateral for leverage trading, meaning the trading collateral itself is also earning interest. This significantly improves liquidity as well. Extended's roadmap plans to increase this to 90%. As of the time of writing, Extended's vault XVS has an APR of 17% over the past 30 days, with a TVL of $77 million, accounting for nearly 50% of Starknet's total TVL.

On the fee structure side, Extended's Taker fee is 0.025%, Maker fee is 0%; liquidation fee is 0.5%; since it is deployed on the Starknet network, it also involves a Gas fee, which is subsidized by Starknet and reduced to 0. Additionally, rewards in XVS will be given based on different membership levels, with higher levels receiving more rewards for more trading.

As mentioned earlier, Extended is often mentioned together with Variational. Due to Extended's fee structure being more Maker-friendly, the tip from the author is: place Maker orders on Extended, place orders close to the market price to enjoy Extended's rebates; then simultaneously place orders in Variational at the same price in the opposite direction. Try to make the Extended account a profitable account when closing positions, while Variational is a loss account, as Variational has a lottery mechanism for returning losses.

Paradex

Paradex is also a Perp DEX previously briefly introduced by the author, where the author previously saw its potential as the largest options DEX. The advantage in perpetual contracts was not outstanding, but the author has now changed this view.

Starting from the second half of 2025, Paradex has seen significant growth in the perpetual contract market, and as of January 6, 2026, Paradex has surpassed a $200 billion trading volume.

As mentioned earlier, Paradex's team's greatest strength is its deep institutional-grade options and derivatives market experience, which is an advantage that several other project teams do not possess. Incubated by the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm (not related to the VC firm of the same name), Paradex is worth discussing, even though the incubator is not the well-known crypto top-tier VC Paradigm, but rather the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm with the same name.

Founded in 2019, Paradigm serves hedge funds, market makers, home offices, and other institutions, conducting extensive research in the crypto options and other derivatives trading markets. Initially, its operating model 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 cryptocurrency options market, raised $35 million at a $400 million valuation, with investments led by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research. However, after FTX collapsed, Paradigm, as a partner, also suffered a significant blow. Following 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 distinct feature is its support for perpetual swaps, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading. It implemented a unified margin system similar to Hyperliquid's earlier, where all trades are settled in one account, any asset can be used as collateral, and it supports isolated, cross, and portfolio margin modes, significantly improving capital efficiency. Additionally, it is noteworthy that Paradex currently charges 0 fees.

Paradex also has some innovations in its treasury. The official treasury currently has an APR of 13.5% and a TVL of $105.4 million. The treasury allows users to receive LP tokens proportionally and to compound with mainstream DeFi protocols such as Pendle, Morpho, Aave, among others. Apart from the official treasury, Paradex also has the widest selection of trader treasuries in the Perp DEX market, where traders can choose the treasury they trust based on trading style, P&L, management and performance fees, APY, TVL, and other metrics.

Paradex has currently released its tokenomics, with 20% allocated to the points airdrop, including 57.6% of the tokens allocated for community rewards, where the community's expectation for coin issuance is exceptionally strong. Therefore, Paradex often forms a 2026 Perp DEX farming portfolio together with Extended, Variational, and others.

StandX

Initially, StandX was also highly sought after by the community due to its Binance genes. CEO Aaron Gong and co-founder Justin Cheng were core members of Binance's Futures contract business team, bringing ample CEX derivative experience to the table.

In April last year, StandX launched the stablecoin DUSD and went live with its mainnet at the end of November. Up to now, it has been entirely self-funded without any external investment. As one of its core products, DUSD offers a 5.2% APY with a TVL of $157 million. StandX's treasury, SLP, currently has a TVL of $22 million, with no displayed APY data yet.

Another noteworthy feature is the recently launched Maker Points, which is also the pioneering "order mining" model in the Perp DEX track. Many Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) have referred to it as the "Blur" of the Perp DEX track, where there is no cost as long as the order is not executed. Limit orders must remain on the order book for more than 3 seconds to earn points. The core mechanism is that the closer the order price is to the market price, the larger the order size, and the longer the order duration, the more points you earn. It is best to control within 10 basis points, where you would receive 100% of the points. Ten basis points are equal to 0.1%. For example, if Bitcoin is at $100,000, placing an order between $99,900 and $100,100 would suffice. Additionally, earning points between 10-30 basis points will get you 50% of the points, and between 30-100 basis points will earn you 10% of the points.

This model will significantly increase StandX's depth, and it is expected that many studios will integrate StandX's API to start scripting. Friends with coding capabilities can also try combining AI to play around with this feature. The gameplay will be much more fun than other Perp DEX platforms that focus on real fee transaction volume and will also have much lower costs.

StandX's mainnet has only been live for less than two months, but the daily trading volume has already reached a historic high of $372 million, with significant market discussion. Overall, compared to other Perp DEX platforms, StandX presents an earlier Alpha opportunity.

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