Hyperliquid Dominates On-Chain Perps Race—While TradFi Still Tries to Spell ’DEX’
Forget centralized exchanges playing catch-up—Hyperliquid’s volume surge proves DeFi degens have moved on. No middlemen, no opaque order books—just raw, on-chain leverage trading. And yet, Wall Street ’innovators’ will probably slap a 2x leveraged ETF on it by Q3.
Perpetual DEX are growing their volumes, getting a boost from crypto market trends for high-leverage long or short positions. | Source: DeFi Llama
In total, perpetual DEX locks up $4.95B in various vaults. Perpetual DEX carries hundreds of tokens and reacts to market trends by quickly opening new pairs. Some DEX, like Hyperliquid, also offer passive gains for providing liquidity, though with the inherent risk of having the liquidity pool drained in risky trades.
The performance of Hyperliquid currently surpasses all other smaller perpetual DEX in terms of daily volumes. Hyperliquid is also recovering from recent liquidations, where risk-taking whales developed large positions and allowed themselves to be liquidated. The recent performance of Hyperliquid and perpetual DEX showed the DeFi sector remained resilient and even benefitted from volatility.
Perpetual futures have always gained volumes on Binance, OKX, and other large-scale exchanges. However, decentralized, no-KYC exchanges are tapping a wider market. The past months saw almost daily launches of small-scale perpetual DEX protocols, which are now trying to grow their liquidity.
Hyperliquid leads perpetual DEX token growth
The appearance of multiple perpetual DEX led to the creation of a new class of tokens. HYPE is the leader, with a market cap of $6.2B. After a successful month, HYPE traded at $18.66, its highest price for the past 30 days.
Smaller tokens comprise the rest of the market cap, up to $7.6B, with most assets growing actively. Perpetual DEX appears on almost all major chains, tapping Solana and BNB Smart Chain.
The sector is highly competitive, with multiple markets aiming to repeat the success of Hyperliquid. Smaller markets are risky, as in the case of KiloEX, the recently hacked perpetual DEX market on BNB Chain and Mantle.
The main advantage of Hyperliquid and other perpetual DEX is the ability to tap the newest trends, especially for BTC and ETH. Hyperliquid still allows relatively high leverage, drawing whales to promising trades. Recently, a whale used the 20X leverage feature to long BTC. The perpetual DEX is also popular for shorting ETH due to the relatively predictable downward trend.
As a result, Hyperliquid has produced over $39M in fees for the past month, which is close to Uniswap. The DEX has produced over $304M in total fees since its launch.
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