Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team
This week, Hyperliquid has once again become the focus of the market.
HYPE prices surged by over 40% in a week, reaching an all-time high. Meanwhile, other Perp DEX projects such as Aster, Lighter, and edgeX also saw varying degrees of price increases, bringing the entire sector back into the market spotlight.
The Perp DEX sector has undergone significant changes over the past year. It is no longer simply an on-chain alternative to CEX contracts, nor does it rely solely on transaction mining, points, and fees for competition. Instead, it is expanding into areas such as stablecoins, RWA, prediction markets, private chains, revenue buybacks, and yield-based margin financing.
In this article, we will review the changes of several representative Perp DEXs over the past year in chronological order, and see what achievements they have made in recent months and what they have been doing.
1️⃣ Hyperliquid: From Trading Platforms to On-Chain Financial Infrastructure
Over the past year, Hyperliquid's changes have not only included continued expansion in trading volume, but also a significant broadening of its product boundaries. It has evolved from a trading platform centered on perpetual contracts to simultaneously expanding into stablecoins, prediction markets, and open contract deployment platforms.
September 2025: USDH vie for Hyperliquid settlement assets
In September 2025, Hyperliquid launched its native stablecoin, USDH. What makes USDH unique compared to stablecoins issued by ordinary projects is that it is vying for access to USD liquidity within Hyperliquid.
October 2025: HIP-3 will transition from official listing to a Builder-built marketplace.
In October 2025, Hyperliquid launched HIP-3. Prior to this, the list of assets on Hyperliquid's perpetual contract market was primarily determined by the platform itself. With HIP-3, external builders can also deploy their own Perp markets on Hyperliquid.
The HIP-3 market is now beginning to cover traditional financial, commodity, and equity asset classes.
WTI crude oil trading volume in the past 24 hours was approximately $877 million, with open interest of approximately $209 million.
Brent crude oil's 24-hour trading volume was approximately $368 million, while OI's was approximately $323 million.
If you don't have a concept of this number, you can understand it as follows: the 24-hour trading volume of the top HIP-3 market is approaching the level of mid-tier mainstream assets ranked in the top 10 to 20 of Binance's trading volume list.
May 2026: HIP-4 launched, Hyperliquid began developing native prediction markets.
In February 2026, Hyperliquid proposed HIP-4, introducing outcome contracts; it was subsequently rolled out on the testnet, and the first live outcome markets began to appear in early May.
Unlike traditional perpetual contracts, HIP-4 allows users to trade the range in which the underlying asset's price will ultimately fall.
Currently, HIP-4 has launched two BTC price prediction markets, including "Will BTC be higher than a certain price at a certain point in time?" and "Will BTC fall within a certain price range?"
The biggest difference between HIP-4 and Polymarket is that HIP-4 is not a standalone product, but is directly embedded in Hyperliquid's account system and matching system. Users can participate in the prediction market with the same trading account without switching funds.
Based on current data, HIP-4 is still in its early stages. The top-performing market saw approximately $32,900 in 24-hour trading volume and $34,900 in open interest.
Similarly, in the BTC daily price prediction market, Polymarket's daily trading volume is approximately $433,700, while Hyperliquid's current top HIP-4 market has a trading volume of approximately $32,900, which is about 1/13 of the former, indicating that it is still in a very early stage.
May 2026: Coinbase and Circle enter the fray, USDC regains its status as a protocol-aligned stablecoin.
Also in May 2026, Hyperliquid's stablecoin strategy underwent a new change.
Coinbase has announced plans to act as the funding deployer to activate AQAv2 on USDC; Circle will act as the technology deployer, responsible for CCTP and native cross-chain infrastructure. Both Coinbase and Circle have committed to staking HYPE to activate AQAv2. As part of the transition arrangement, Native Markets has agreed to grant Coinbase the right to purchase USDH branded assets.
This means that the focus of protocol-aligned stability within the Hyperliquid ecosystem is shifting from USDH to USDC.
With Coinbase acting as the fund deployer and sharing the vast majority of reserve revenue with the protocol, USDC will become a stablecoin on Hyperliquid that better aligns with the protocol's revenue distribution logic.
In future network upgrades, the HIP-4 specification results market will also use USDC as the pricing asset.
2️⃣Aster: From explosive growth in trading volume to attempting to build its own trading ecosystem
Compared to Hyperliquid, which spent a year continuously expanding its protocol boundaries, Aster's growth path is more direct: first, build up trading volume, and then gradually expand its products and infrastructure.
December 2025: Shield Mode launched.
Aster released its 2026 H1 Roadmap and began gradually launching Shield Mode, TWAP strategy orders, and expanding into RWA perpetual markets such as stocks, forex, and commodities.
March 2026: Aster Chain mainnet Phase 1 launches, Aster transitions from Perp DEX to its own L1 platform.
It focuses on privacy transactions, using ZK proofs and private addresses to hide some transaction information, while emphasizing low latency, high throughput, and zero gas experience.
Aster doesn't want to be just a Perp DEX deployed on multiple chains; instead, it wants to integrate matching, privacy, RWA assets, trading incentives, and subsequent governance into its own on-chain system.
May 2026: Continuous Launch of Popular Global Assets and Permissionless Listing Vote
Aster continues to expand its tradable assets. Aster is starting to add more stocks, pre-IPO, commodities, and foreign exchange markets to its trading platform, such as new assets like SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual contracts.
At the same time, Aster launched the Permissionless Listing Vote. This mechanism essentially opens up a portion of the listing power to the community: qualified validators or ASTER stakers can propose new trading pairs, and the community then votes to decide whether to list them.
This is somewhat similar to Hyperliquid's HIP-3, both of which are changing the "platform decides which assets to use" to "external participants jointly drive new markets".
Current data indicates that some traditional financial markets have begun to show signs of trading activity. For example,
Crude oil (CLU) saw a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $8.37 million.
Silver (XAG) was worth approximately US$7.48 million, and gold (XAU) was worth approximately US$3.3 million.
In the pre-IPO market, SpaceX contracts saw a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $1.5 million.
3️⃣StandX: Turn PERP margin into interest-bearing assets
Most Perp DEXs only compete on matching, leverage, and transaction fees. StandX is more interesting: it attempts to turn idle or sunk funds in the trading process back into yield assets.
In January 2026, StandX launched Maker Points.
It rewards not the transaction itself, but the liquidity of pending orders. Users can earn Maker Points even if they only submit a limit order and the order has not yet been filled; once the order is filled, they will further earn Trading Points.
In other words, StandX first transforms the passive liquidity in the orderbook into incentivizable assets.
StandX launched SIP-1 through SIP-4 in March and April.
The product direction is becoming clearer: to build a more capital-efficient Perp trading layer around DUSD, position gains, and large-scale trade execution.
SIP-1 stands for Block Trade, which extracts large-volume derivatives transactions from the regular order book, supports on-chain matching and StandX settlement, and reduces the impact of large orders on the order book.
SIP-2 stands for Position Yield, which allows eligible perpetual positions to participate in profit sharing.
SIP-3 further enhances the native yield of DUSD by directing a portion of StandX Perps trading fees to the DUSD yield pool.
The latest SIP-4 extends Block Trade to the TP/SL scenario. It doesn't simply add a take-profit/stop-loss button, but rather makes TP/SL a position-linked execution right: users can make more flexible trading arrangements around the future exit price, protection price, and reservation fee.
Taken together, StandX’s product narrative is quite complete: DUSD addresses margin returns, Maker Points incentivizes order liquidity, Position Yield improves the efficiency of open positions, and Block Trade and TP/SL serve larger, more professional trading needs.
This makes StandX less like a simple Perp DEX and more like a trading system built around "profitable margin". Its differentiation lies not in giving users higher leverage, but in minimizing idle funds before, during, and after trading.
4️⃣Lighter: Since 2026, the focus has shifted from airdrop expectations to revenue buybacks, RWA, and ZK security narratives.
January 2026: LIT buyback begins, protocol revenue starts to be pegged to the token.
In January 2026, Lighter launched its LIT buyback program. Unlike many projects that keep their revenue in the vault, Lighter claims it will use fees generated from the DEX and future products to buy back LIT on-chain.
Early reports indicated that when the repurchase program was launched, the agreement's treasury already had approximately $1.35 million USDC available for market repurchases; repurchases were subsequently executed multiple times.
February 2026: Upgrade LLP and begin designing separate liquidity strategies for RWA.
In February 2026, Lighter adjusted its Liquidity Provider infrastructure, introducing independent strategies for different market types, including crypto perpetual, forex, and RWA markets. This was done to manage the risk, liquidation, and ADL of different assets separately, rather than having all markets share a single liquidity pool.
This step paved the way for the later expansion of RWA. Because the volatility, trading hours, and liquidity structure of markets such as commodities, stocks, and forex are different from those of crypto assets, it would be difficult to scale up the business if a single pool were used to absorb all the risks.
April 2026: Launch the Liquidity Partner Program, focusing on deepening RWA knowledge.
In April 2026, Lighter launched the Liquidity Partner Program, rewarding participants who provide deep liquidity to the RWA market. This program is open to everyone, and rewards are distributed through random snapshots of the order book; the weekly reward amount is announced in advance.
The program awards approximately $250,000 per week, with a focus on crude oil, precious metals, and stock markets such as NVDA and Tesla.
5️⃣ edgeX: Since 2026, it has moved from Pre-TGE incentives to EDGE Chain and TradeFi Perps
February 2026: Circle Ventures invests, USDC native integration becomes a key focus.
In February 2026, Circle Ventures invested in edgeX.
With Circle Ventures' investment, edgeX can focus on USDC for margin, settlement, cross-chain, and institutional liquidity access, which makes its TradeFi Perps route smoother.
March 2026: EDGE TGE, the token economy officially takes off.
In March 2026, edgeX first announced the EDGE airdrop terms and opened pre-market trading. Subsequently, the official announcement stated that EDGE TGE was scheduled for March 31.
April-May 2026: TradeFi Perps expands, edgeX begins to add stocks and commodities markets.
Following TGE, edgeX continues to expand its TradeFi Perps. The platform has added a large number of stocks, commodities, and bulk markets, including assets such as NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, gold, silver, and crude oil.
This step is similar to the Hyperliquid HIP-3 and Aster RWA expansions, all of which are expanding Perp DEX from crypto asset trading to traditional financial asset trading.
Current trading data shows that liquidity has begun to form in some TradeFi markets. For example:
Gold (XAUUSDC) 24-hour trading volume was approximately $9.49 million.
Crude oil (BZUSDC) approximately $5.89 million
May 2026: Contract V2 Beta launched, edgeX transitioned from a single Perp DEX to the EDGE Stack.
In May 2026, edgeX released the V2 Beta contract.
Simply put: V1 was EdgeX's early trading system, mainly used to get contract trading running. V2 is the next-generation system, aiming to enable the platform to support more markets, faster matching, and more complex trading products.
This upgrade supports trading in contracts, spot markets, prediction markets, as well as traditional financial assets such as stocks, ETFs, gold, and crude oil.
V2 is still in the Beta stage, but many new markets can already be seen on the platform, such as perpetual contracts for stocks and commodities.
In conclusion
Looking back over the past year, the changes at Perp DEX are quite clear: they are no longer satisfied with simply being on-chain contract exchanges.
They chose different paths, but the underlying judgment was similar: Perp DEX cannot remain solely within the crypto contract market.
This year, US stocks have performed strongly, with technology stocks, AI-related assets, and traditional financial markets continuing to attract capital attention. For on-chain trading platforms, users' needs are no longer limited to trading BTC, ETH, and altcoins, but rather they want to trade crypto assets, US stocks, indices, gold, crude oil, and even pre-IPO assets in the same account.
Therefore, Perp DEX is not just competing for the crypto contract market, but for the larger global demand for asset trading. This is why several leading Perp DEXs have been focusing on TradeFi assets over the past year.
The surge in HYPE merely brought Perp DEX back into the market spotlight. The truly deeper change is that the competition for Perp DEX has shifted from being a substitute for CEXs to "who can handle more global asset trading demand."
