The Aster DEX and Lighter have been gaining ground in the decentralized perpetual futures (perps) DEX market that Hyperliquid has long been the dominant player, often capturing over 50% of open interest and generating massive revenues through its Layer 1 blockchain.

The Aster DEX has enjoyed a surge in trading volume thanks to various factors, including the launch of its token in September 2025, the high leverage it offers, and integrated spot/yield strategies. 

It has emerged as a challenger to top perp DEXs like  Hyperliquid, appearing just below Hyperliquid in daily/weekly volume rankings according to data from Defillama. 

Aster and Lighter have made significant progress 

The Aster DEX was endorsed by Changpeng Zhao, and he has publicly disclosed holdings of the token, going as far as shilling its chart. For context, the last time CZ shilled the chart of a token was for BNB when it was sub $50. 

The Aster token is currently under $1, trading at $0.72, and bull Crypto Twitter bulls claim this is the cheapest it will ever be. However, risks like token unlocks continue to put pressure on the price, and there is a $75 million token unlock happening this week, as reported by Cryptopolitan. 

Unlike Aster, Lighter has no token yet but was running a points farming campaign until mid-December. The Ethereum L2-based platform has witnessed even more rapid growth compared to Aster and occupies a mid-tier position. 

According to available data, Lighter currently pulls in a lower volume than Aster and Hyperliquid; however, it has been consistent. That changed briefly in November when it jumped to the top of the perps leaderboard on DefiLlama after raising $68 million in a new funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital. 

The funding round announcement was made just as Lighter pushed to the top of perpetual futures-focused DEXs, outpacing rivals Hyperliquid and Aster.

Data from DefiLlama shows that the platform is now the largest decentralized perp exchange by trading volume on the monthly timeframes, with $252 billion in perpetual swaps trading volume, followed by Aster’s $218 billion. Open interest for the DEX has also surged to $1.7 billion, behind Aster’s $2.4 billion and Hyperliquid’s $7 billion. 

Lighter has made a name for itself as a destination for institutional or smart money flow because of its low latency and gas-efficient order books paired with zk-rollup speed. This means standard accounts on the platform don’t incur taker or maker fees, which allows retail users to trade across all markets without costs.

Its points system has also implied there will be an airdrop, which has acted as incentive for traders to use the platform. That could actually backfire as many of those people could simply move on to other platforms after the airdrop, as is often seen. 

One thing is clear from the metrics – Hyperliquid is the dominant leader in the perps DEX space, as it leads in fundamentals like open interest, TVL, and innovations such as HIP-3 for permissionless listings, HyperEVM and a pending Bitwise ETF filing. 

It is closely followed by Aster the challenger and Lighter, which is quickly becoming a niche platform with its loyal customer base. 

Hyperliquid’s success led to new perp DEXs

Hyperliquid is the undisputed leader of the perps DEX wars, but it has been losing market share to Aster, Lighter and even EdgeX, the DEX that occupies fourth place on the leaderboard, because of incentives and scalability.

Tomas Fanta, principal at crypto investment firm Heartcore, has implied that the launch and success of Hyperliquid is what triggered the competition, causing a “wave of copy-cat perp DEXs” to flood the VC market even though most of them “have zero innovation.”

According to Fanta, most pure VC funds — those unable to invest in liquid markets — were sidelined by HYPE’s success, so there is an “opportunity to look for a Hyperliquid contender.” 

He cautioned, however, that there are no guarantees these attempts succeed, as Hyperliquid’s rise was heavily influenced by its “no-VC” narrative and community reward mechanism.

Among the top three, the most likely contender for the top spot in the future is Aster, and it has been marketed as such. However, there has been friction in the Aster community recently with holders complaining of not being rewarded and community members alleging the continuous airdrop campaign is only diluting token value. 

The biggest issue has become the negative price action, which has persisted in the face of accelerated buybacks, encouraging allegations of the team selling the tokens bought via another wallet. 

Lighter has also had its own fair share of problems. The platform launched its public mainnet on October 1, after eight months of private beta testing. However, as it launched, it faced a major outage just nine days later during the October 10 market crash, forcing the team to later admit that its systems couldn’t handle the traffic surge and that it would upgrade database capacity. 

Traders who were affected by the outage, which led to about $50 million in losses, were compensated with “Lighter points” that can be exchanged for a future token airdrop.

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