Top DeFi Perpetual Protocols (Perp DEX) — 2025 Overview

In 2025, decentralized perpetual exchanges (Perp DEXs) have become a cornerstone of DeFi, offering on-chain leverage, transparency, and passive earning options that rival centralized futures platforms. The leading protocols — Hyperliquid, Aster, GMX, dYdX, MYX Finance, Drift, Jupiter, and Lighter — differ by network, liquidity model, and user focus. Some use order books for CEX-level speed (like Hyperliquid, dYdX), others rely on AMM or hybrid pools for accessibility and yield (like GMX, Drift, Aster, MYX). They can be compared by core metrics such as liquidity depth, execution speed, leverage, and how users earn beyond trading — for example, by staking, funding participation, or LP vaults. Together, they define the evolving landscape of decentralized derivatives.

Table of Contents:

• 🚀 The rise of on-chain perpetuals
• 📊 TL;DR — quick comparison
• ⚡ Hyperliquid — CEX speed, on-chain reliability
• 🌐 Aster DEX — multi-chain leverage and accessibility
• 🔵 GMX — GLP-based liquidity and stable yields
• ⚙️ dYdX — the Cosmos app-chain pioneer
• 🧩 MYX Finance — cross-chain perps with zero-slippage matching
• ⚡ Drift Protocol — dynamic liquidity and cross-margin yield
• 💠 Lighter — zero-fee trading with zk-verified order book
• 🚀 Jupiter Perps — Solana’s all-in-one gateway to derivatives
• 🔮 Final Thoughts — The Road Ahead for Perpetual Protocols

The rise of on-chain perpetuals 🚀

Decentralized perpetual protocols — or Perp DEXs — are the backbone of on-chain derivatives trading.
They let traders open long and short positions with leverage, just like on centralized exchanges (CEXs), but without custodial risk or KYC. Unlike spot DEXs, Perp DEXs continuously price assets through funding rates and allow open-ended positions with built-in liquidation mechanics.

For users, the key advantage is self-custody and transparency: trades, liquidations, and funding payments all occur on-chain. For liquidity providers, these protocols offer new earning opportunities — from funding rate spreads to LP fees and staking rewards. In 2025, Perp DEXs have evolved beyond experimental AMMs into high-performance platforms that rival CEXs in speed and depth.

We’ll explore and compare them across the most important dimensions:

• 🧱 Network architecture — which chains or app-chains they run on.
• ⚙️ Liquidity model — AMM, order book, or hybrid.
• 💰 Ways to earn — liquidity provision, staking, or funding rate yield.
• 📊 Trading metrics — TVL, volume, open interest, and leverage range.
• 👤 User focus — professional traders, DeFi investors, or casual users.

In this 2025 overview, we’ll see how leading protocols like Hyperliquid, Aster, GMX, dYdX, Drift, and others differ — and which category of users each serves best.

TL;DR — quick comparison 📊

Before diving deep into each protocol, here’s a snapshot of how today’s top DeFi Perpetual Protocols (Perp DEXs) compare across the most important features. This table helps you instantly see who focuses on speed, who offers the highest yields, and which model fits your trading style.

🧩 Key insight: CLOB-based DEXs such as Hyperliquid and dYdX provide the deepest liquidity and the most precise price execution, making them ideal for professional and high-volume traders. AMM and hybrid models like GMX, Aster, and Drift are designed for broader DeFi participation, offering easier access and several earning options through liquidity provision, staking, and funding fees.

Hyperliquid — CEX speed, on-chain reliability ⚡

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual exchange built on its own Layer-1 blockchain, HyperCore. The team designed a custom network because existing infrastructures such as Ethereum and Solana could not deliver the combination of deterministic order execution, sub-second finality, and full transparency required for high-frequency trading. On shared chains, transactions often compete for block space with NFTs and DeFi activity, which can delay order matching and create opportunities for frontrunning. HyperCore eliminates these issues through dedicated consensus, predictable gas fees in the HYPE token, and the ability to process hundreds of thousands of orders per second.

This architecture allows Hyperliquid to operate with the performance of a centralized exchange while keeping all activity verifiable on-chain. Blocks are produced roughly every 150 milliseconds, ensuring near-instant confirmations and consistent stability even during peak volatility. By mid-2025 the platform handled more than 70–80 percent of all decentralized perpetual trading, processing over 350 billion USD in monthly volume and frequently exceeding 30 billion USD per day, according to DefiLlama. Its cumulative trading volume has already passed 2.5 trillion USD, and daily revenue often surpasses 100 million USD. These figures illustrate how a purpose-built chain has allowed Hyperliquid to outpace every EVM-based or Solana-based alternative in both scale and efficiency.

Beyond its technical edge, Hyperliquid stands out for its community-driven tokenomics. The project avoided venture capital allocations, distributing about 70 percent of tokens to users, and burns most trading fees to reduce total supply. This has fostered long-term loyalty among traders and liquidity providers. For users who prefer passive income rather than active trading, HLP vaults offer yields around six to eight percent annually, while HYPE staking and governance participation provide additional earning opportunities.

In 2025, Hyperliquid has become the benchmark for decentralized derivatives — a system that merges the speed and precision of centralized platforms with the transparency and self-custody principles of DeFi.
Source: DefiLlama

Aster DEX — multi-chain leverage and accessibility 🌐

Aster DEX is a multi-chain perpetual exchange and yield platform created from the merger of Astherus and APX Finance. It connects seven EVM-compatible networks and Solana through unified cross-chain vaults, enabling traders to open perpetual positions with leverage up to 1001x while earning passive rewards through staking and liquidity programs. Unlike Hyperliquid, which built its own Layer-1 chain to maximize speed and determinism, Aster focuses on interoperability — linking liquidity from different ecosystems into one shared trading environment.

The platform uses a hybrid model that combines automated market making with on-chain order books, giving users deep liquidity and flexible execution without relying on a single network. Maker fees start at just 0.01 percent, and more than half of the ASTER token supply is distributed to the community through airdrops and rewards. Following its Token Generation Event on September 17, 2025, ASTER became the first token launched on CoinMarketCap’s CMC Launch platform and quickly captured around twenty percent of the global perpetual DEX market.

In 2025, Aster stands as a more open and accessible counterpart to Hyperliquid — a protocol that bridges multiple blockchains instead of building its own, expanding perpetual trading to a broader DeFi audience.

GMX — GLP-based liquidity and stable yields 🔵

GMX introduced a model fundamentally different from order book–based perpetual exchanges such as Hyperliquid and Aster. Instead of matching buyers and sellers directly, GMX uses a single pooled liquidity system called GLP — a diversified basket of assets that acts as the counterparty to all trades. When traders profit, the pool decreases in value; when traders lose, GLP holders benefit. This creates a built-in balancing mechanism between traders and liquidity providers.

The GLP model used by GMX replaces the traditional order book with a single pooled liquidity system where traders open positions against a basket of assets such as ETH, BTC, and stablecoins. This setup removes the need for external market makers and provides predictable liquidity, but it also means that large trades can experience higher slippage than on order-book DEXs like Hyperliquid or Aster, where prices adjust dynamically based on depth of bids and asks. GMX relies on oracle pricing from networks such as Chainlink and Pyth, which introduces a brief delay in execution but keeps pricing transparent and manipulation-resistant.

Liquidations in GMX are handled differently as well: instead of instant on-chain matching, the protocol uses oracle-based triggers that close positions against the GLP pool once margin thresholds are breached. This method protects the pool from insolvency and smooths liquidation pressure, though it can result in slight delays during extreme volatility. For liquidity providers, the design offers genuine yield from trading fees, funding payments, and traders’ net performance — when traders lose, the pool gains. As a result, GMX prioritizes consistency and sustainable returns over raw execution speed, appealing to users who prefer passive yield and balanced risk rather than ultra-tight spreads or high-frequency trading.

Since its launch on Arbitrum, GMX has expanded to Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Solana, and Botanix, connecting multiple ecosystems through unified contracts. Unlike Aster’s cross-chain relayer model or Hyperliquid’s custom Layer-1, GMX maintains independent deployments on each network, prioritizing simplicity, transparency, and long-term sustainability of its liquidity pools. This structure has made GMX a benchmark for AMM-based perpetuals, focusing on stability and yield rather than maximum speed or leverage.

dYdX — the Cosmos app-chain pioneer ⚙️

dYdX is one of the earliest and most influential perpetual exchanges in DeFi. Originally launched on Ethereum, the protocol migrated in 2023 to its own blockchain built with the Cosmos SDK to achieve full decentralization and higher performance. This move gave dYdX independent validators, cross-chain deposits, and complete control over transaction sequencing and block production, removing the congestion and gas cost issues typical of Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks.

The Cosmos-based architecture allows dYdX to maintain an off-chain matching engine while keeping all trades and balances verifiable on-chain. This hybrid model delivers centralized exchange–level speed with decentralized transparency. The network processes thousands of orders per second and supports over two hundred perpetual markets with leverage up to fifty times. As of 2025, the protocol holds more than one billion dollars in total value locked and handles roughly 2.8 billion in daily trading volume. A major upgrade planned for late 2025 will add spot markets and direct Telegram-based trading, extending accessibility beyond the browser interface.

Compared to Hyperliquid, which runs on a proprietary Layer-1 focused on raw execution speed, dYdX emphasizes governance, validator diversity, and composability within the Cosmos ecosystem. Hyperliquid is a vertically integrated system, while dYdX functions as a sovereign chain connected to others through the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. This makes it more open and federated but slightly less optimized for latency. For users, the difference is clear: Hyperliquid feels like a high-speed trading venue; dYdX behaves like a decentralized institution — slower by milliseconds but built for long-term decentralization, transparency, and interoperability.

MYX Finance — cross-chain perps with zero-slippage matching ⚙️

MYX Finance is a multi-chain perpetual exchange designed to remove price slippage and simplify access across major EVM networks. Operating on BNB Chain, Linea, Arbitrum, and opBNB, the protocol allows users to trade USDC-margined perpetual futures directly from any supported chain without bridging assets. Its Matching Pool Mechanism (MPM) internally pairs long and short positions rather than relying on AMM curves or live order books. Prices are determined by oracles such as Pyth or Chainlink, so all trades execute at the same reference rate — regardless of order size — delivering zero-slippage execution by design.

Unlike AMM-based systems like GMX, where traders face a liquidity pool as their counterparty, or order-book DEXs such as Hyperliquid and dYdX, where trades depend on real-time market depth, MYX balances exposure between traders within a shared pool. When open interest tilts to one side, excess risk is absorbed by MPM vaults funded by liquidity providers. This internal matching makes trading smooth and predictable while keeping spreads stable even in volatile conditions.

Leverage on MYX is provided by these liquidity vaults, which temporarily extend margin to traders and earn returns from funding payments and trading fees. For non-traders, this structure opens passive earning opportunities: users can deposit USDC into vaults to supply margin liquidity or stake veMYX tokens to receive a share of protocol revenue and boosted rewards. This model resembles lending but with dynamic risk balancing between long and short positions, producing a sustainable yield typically between five and fifteen percent annually.

BNB Chain ensures low-cost scalability and wide accessibility for retail traders, while Linea — a Layer 2 built by Consensys — provides secure, EVM-compatible settlement with faster and cheaper transactions. Together, these networks position MYX as one of the first truly cross-chain perpetual protocols, combining stable pricing, gasless execution, and real earning mechanics without relying on external market makers or bridges.

Drift Protocol — dynamic liquidity and cross-margin yield ⚡

Drift Protocol is the largest open-source perpetual exchange built on Solana, combining speed, composability, and yield optimization within one ecosystem. It leverages Solana’s ultra-fast 100-millisecond block finality to process perpetual futures up to 101× leverage, spot markets up to 5×, and token swaps with minimal latency and negligible fees. Since launch, Drift has processed over $24 billion in cumulative volume, attracted more than 180,000 users, and reached over $300 million in total value locked.

The core of Drift’s architecture is its JIT (Just-In-Time) liquidity mechanism, which replaces static AMM pools with on-demand liquidity injection. Instead of keeping assets locked in trading pairs, liquidity providers or bots supply funds exactly at the moment of execution, then withdraw them immediately after the trade is filled. This makes capital use highly efficient — liquidity is active only when needed, without the idle capital or impermanent loss typical of AMMs. For users, this translates into deeper liquidity and more consistent execution, while for LPs it means higher returns on capital since their funds are continuously reused rather than sitting idle in pools.

Another defining feature of Drift is its cross-margined system with auto-yield on collateral. Traders can use any supported token as margin, and even while it serves as collateral, that token automatically accrues yield through integrated DeFi strategies. This means a trader’s deposit never stays idle — it continuously earns interest from funding rates and on-chain lending markets. The result is a system where trading and yield farming coexist: collateral generates passive returns, and traders benefit from improved capital efficiency.

For non-traders, Drift offers several ways to earn. Users can deposit assets into community vaults, which act as pooled liquidity providers for JIT execution and margin funding. Vault participants receive a share of trading fees, funding rate payments, and protocol incentives in DRIFT tokens. Additionally, staking DRIFT tokens grants governance rights and a portion of protocol revenue, while providing liquidity in stable pairs generates steady, low-risk returns. Combined, these yield streams allow passive investors to benefit from the same trading activity that powers the platform — without opening leveraged positions themselves.

Drift represents a middle ground between GMX’s GLP model and Hyperliquid’s order-book precision. It offers the automation and simplicity of an AMM, the capital efficiency of a CLOB, and the passive income mechanics of DeFi — all powered by Solana’s unmatched speed and low fees. For Solana-native users, it stands out as one of the most innovative perpetual DEXs, where every dollar of liquidity is used dynamically and every deposit works to earn yield.

Lighter — zero-fee trading with zk-verified order book ⚙️

Lighter is a new generation of perpetual exchange built on a zk-Rollup architecture on Arbitrum, combining the precision of order-book trading with the scalability and cost efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs. Trades are matched through a fully on-chain CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), while execution batches are verified off-chain and settled back on Ethereum using succinct zk-proofs. This design allows the protocol to process thousands of trades per second with negligible gas costs and near-instant confirmations — all without compromising transparency or custody.

A defining advantage of Lighter is its zero-fee trading environment. Maker and taker fees are covered by protocol rewards generated from staking and funding flows inside its LLP pools. Traders therefore enjoy CEX-level execution quality with no trading commissions, while liquidity providers earn sustainable yield from funding rates, protocol incentives, and the re-staking of LLP tokens. These pools collectively supply the liquidity that market makers draw on when filling orders, giving stakers real exposure to the protocol’s trading activity.

Because settlements are validated cryptographically through ZK proofs, every batch of transactions is mathematically verifiable — removing the need for trust in operators or intermediaries. This makes Lighter one of the first perpetual DEXs to deliver exchange-grade performance under fully auditable conditions. For users who prefer passive income over active trading, staking LLP or locking LTR tokens offers steady yield derived from fee rebates and the protocol’s zero-fee incentive fund. With zk-verified transparency, cost-free execution, and gas-efficient scalability, Lighter represents the next evolutionary step in on-chain derivatives on Arbitrum.

Jupiter Perps — Solana’s all-in-one gateway to derivatives 🚀

Jupiter Perps is Solana’s dominant perpetual futures exchange and part of the broader Jupiter DeFi ecosystem — the network’s main DEX aggregator and liquidity hub. It provides seamless access to perpetual trading with up to 150× leverage directly within the same interface that powers Solana’s swap, meme coin, and staking markets. By integrating perpetuals into its existing infrastructure, Jupiter transforms leveraged trading from a standalone product into a natural extension of everyday DeFi activity.

The protocol operates through a hybrid liquidity model that merges internal LP vaults with external AMMs like Raydium and Orca, assisted by off-chain keepers for order matching and liquidation. This aggregated design enables low-slippage execution without requiring a proprietary AMM or order book. Instead, Jupiter routes each order dynamically to the best available liquidity source at that block, ensuring stable prices and minimal delays. Traders can use any Solana asset as collateral, with all positions margined and settled on-chain through Jupiter’s unified contracts.

Since its beta launch, Jupiter Perps has captured over 65% of Solana’s perpetual trading market, processing more than $290 billion in cumulative volume and maintaining daily activity from thousands of addresses. Even with only three supported pairs (SOL, wBTC, and ETH), it consistently generates tens of billions in monthly volume and millions in fees, demonstrating exceptional capital efficiency. Its native integration with Solana’s largest DEX ecosystem gives it a unique advantage: users can move between swaps, farming, and perpetuals without leaving the Jupiter platform or bridging assets.

For non-traders, Jupiter offers LP vault staking and JUP token rewards tied to trading volume and liquidity contribution. These vaults fund perpetual liquidity and earn returns from trading fees and protocol incentives. Combined with the aggregator’s fee rebates, this creates a simple way for retail users to earn yield while supporting market depth — without the complexity of professional market making.

Final Thoughts — The Road Ahead for Perpetual Protocols 🔮

The rise of decentralized perpetual exchanges in 2025 marks a turning point for DeFi. What started as a niche alternative to centralized futures trading has evolved into a mature ecosystem processing trillions in cumulative volume and offering real competition to CEXs. These protocols no longer aim to imitate centralized platforms — they are redefining what on-chain leverage and transparency can look like.

As the market matures, two trends are becoming clear. First, infrastructure specialization: platforms like Hyperliquid and dYdX are proving that building dedicated blockchains can unlock deterministic execution and deeper decentralization. Second, interoperable liquidity: multi-chain systems such as Aster and MYX are linking fragmented ecosystems into one unified derivatives layer. Together, these forces are shaping a new DeFi backbone for leverage, hedging, and passive income.

Looking ahead to 2026, competition will likely intensify. Dominant players like Hyperliquid will keep setting performance standards, while challengers such as Aster, MYX, and Drift experiment with hybrid liquidity and cross-chain leverage. Jupiter, meanwhile, demonstrates how derivatives can blend seamlessly into mainstream DeFi — not as a separate product, but as part of a unified trading experience.

Regulation is the next frontier. As on-chain derivatives gain institutional attention, frameworks for transparency, margin accounting, and user protection will define how fast decentralized perpetuals can scale. But one thing is clear: perpetual DEXs have already secured their place in the financial architecture of Web3 — fast, transparent, and user-owned by design.