A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date. It stays close to the price of its underlying asset through funding: periodic payments between longs and shorts that grow as the contract's price drifts from an index. Perpetuals have traded outside the U.S. since 2016 [32], and since 2025 a growing share of that trading has moved to on-chain venues.
CoinGecko counts $6.38 trillion of volume on the top 12 perpetual DEXes in 2025, up from $1.50 trillion in 2024, against $85.3 trillion on centralized perpetual exchanges [1]. The DEX share of volume rose from 3% in January 2025 to 13% by the end of the year and stood at 10% in April 2026 [1]. Castle Labs, in October 2026, put the share at over 13%, with a peak above 14.25% in December 2025 [4].
This explainer covers how these venues are built, how they price and charge, and what their public data does and does not show.
Four ways to build a venue
Every perpetual venue has to decide where orders are matched and how anyone can check that matching was fair. The large on-chain venues answer differently.
| Design | Example | Where matching happens | How it is checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-chain order book | Hyperliquid | In the chain's own state, ordered by consensus | Validators agree on one order of transactions [8] |
| Validator order books | dYdX v4 | In each validator's in-memory book, off-chain | Matched trades are committed on-chain each block [15] |
| Proven matching | Lighter | In a matching engine on an Ethereum Layer 2 | Succinct proofs cover price-time priority and risk checks [16] |
| Oracle-priced pools | GMX | Against liquidity pools at an oracle index price | Prices come from Chainlink Data Streams oracles [21] |
Hyperliquid reports a median end-to-end latency of 0.2 seconds for a co-located client and about 200,000 orders per second on mainnet [8]. GMX routes every order against its GM and GLV pools and quotes the oracle index price, with no order book [21]. The choice decides who takes the other side of a trade, how new markets are added and what the venue's data can reveal.
Fees are a design choice
Hyperliquid's base tier charges 0.015% maker and 0.045% taker, falling with volume and with staked HYPE [9]. Lighter charges standard accounts nothing and adds 300 ms of latency to their taker orders; premium accounts pay fees and wait 140 ms [17]. GMX charges a position fee of 0.04% or 0.06%, depending on whether a trade narrows or widens the gap between long and short open interest, plus borrowing fees and price impact [22].
The fee line is only part of the cost. In Rillor's study of crude oil perpetuals, Lighter's zero-fee and low-latency account terms were mutually exclusive, and that trade-off was central to whether a cross-venue price lead could be captured at all [34].
Oracles and funding
Funding needs an index, and the index needs an oracle. Hyperliquid's validators publish a weighted median of prices from centralized exchanges about every three seconds; funding is paid hourly, with the premium sampled every five seconds and a cap of 4% per hour [10, 11]. Lighter samples its premium once a minute at a random time and halves the premium for real-world-asset markets [18]. GMX sets funding by the imbalance between long and short open interest and accrues it per second [22].
Oracles matter more when the reference market is closed. Lighter falls back to a price built from its own order book when oracle data goes stale [19]. On Hyperliquid, a builder-deployed crude market hit a ±5% bound on the first weekend of the 2026 Iran crisis and captured about 45% of the gap CME opened with on Monday [26].
Volume, open interest and one hard day
Perpetual DEX volume passed $1 trillion in a month for the first time in September 2025, at $1.05 trillion, with Aster above $420 billion, Hyperliquid at $282.5 billion and Lighter at $164.4 billion [2]. On 10 October 2025, more than $19 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated within 24 hours. Perpetual open interest across major exchanges fell 43%, and Hyperliquid's fell 57%, from $14 billion to $6 billion [7].
Volume on the top 12 DEXes fell from $751.59 billion in January 2026 to $481.84 billion in April [1]. Concentration stayed high. As of 30 April 2026, Hyperliquid held 39.5% of top-12 DEX volume and 59.1% of open interest [1], and in October 2026 Castle Labs put its open interest share above 56%, followed by Aster at 9.7%, Variational at 6.2% and Lighter at 5.7% [4].
Real-world assets came on-chain
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 upgrade went live on 13 October 2025 and lets a builder who stakes 500,000 HYPE deploy a perpetual market and define its oracle and contract terms [12, 23]. In March 2026, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 to Trade[XYZ] for a perpetual on Hyperliquid [24]. Grayscale, citing Artemis data, reported that open interest across HIP-3 markets hit a peak of $3.2 billion in June 2026 [6].
The category is larger than any one venue. a16z crypto counts $701 billion of real-world-asset perpetual volume in August 2026 across tracked venues, 85% of it on centralized exchanges, with equities at 62% of volume [25].
What order-level data shows
Volume figures are only as good as the data behind them. Hyperliquid's trade feed lists the buyer and seller address on each trade [14]. Lighter streams its book as a snapshot followed by changes and flags liquidation trades [20]. In October 2025, after Aster's volume began tracking Binance's closely, DefiLlama removed Aster's perpetual volume because Aster did not provide data on who was making and filling orders, which it needed to check for wash trading [27].
Incentives also move the numbers. After Lighter's token airdrop on 30 December 2025, about $250 million, about 20% of its total value locked, was withdrawn within 24 hours [28]. CoinGecko links the recent gains of newer venues to their points programs [1].
Regulation moved onshore
Coinbase began offering CFTC-regulated perpetual-style futures with five-year expiries in July 2025 [29]. On 29 May 2026, the CFTC issued an order permitting a bitcoin perpetual to be listed as a futures contract and a policy statement on perpetual listings [30]. CME sued the CFTC on 18 June 2026, arguing that perpetuals are swaps [31]. In September 2026, Payward announced its intention to offer U.S. clients perpetuals on Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets through Bitnomial, subject to regulatory approval [32].
Read the full report
The full report, available as a PDF, covers each venue design, the fee, funding and oracle rules, the volume and open interest data with its caveats, real-world-asset perpetuals and the regulatory record, with all sources listed.