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Over the past month, we’ve seen increasing popularity in perpetual DEXs: both in their tokens (ASTER and APEX) as well as a variety of platforms, which have seen increased volumes due to farming activity (Lighter, Pacifica etc). With the Hyperliquid airdrop worth billions of dollars, most participants are focused on being early to the “next Hyperliquid,” akin to how the L1 trade played out last cycle, where participants wanted to have the chance to be early again.
One key critique that has come up against Hyperliquid is that it is now losing its lead. On first glance, this appears to be true. While Hyperliquid maintained strong positioning with $9.19 billion in average daily volume, Aster’s explosive entry caused Hyperliquid’s market share to compress from 56.1% to 13.7% among leading perpetuals DEXs.
However, volume metrics can be easily gamed. Open interest is much more expensive to fake and provides a more reliable indicator of genuine platform usage. By this measure, Hyperliquid remains the dominant platform for perpetual trading with over $13.1 billion in open interest, displaying a notably healthy OI/volume ratio of 1.61.
OI on competitors is much lower. Lighter has $5.39 billion average daily volume over the past month, $1.37 billion in OI as of today, with a OI/volume ratio of 0.181. Aster has an OI/volume ratio of just 0.02.
One key differentiator for Hyperliquid will be how it responds to impeding competitors. In the early days, Ethereum dismissed Solana as a competitor, claiming it was ephemeral activity. That wasn’t the case. Dismissing Lighter and Aster as doing well only because they are being farmed heavily would be a mistake; the tide can shift quickly. Lighter has a strong working product (albeit without the listing velocity and UI of Hyperliquid) and Aster has Binance and CZ’s backing.
Another interesting potential implication here is if we see fee compression for perpetual DEXs. Lighter has 0 fees for both makers and takers. We saw a shift toward zero fees on traditional brokerages and exchanges, as brokerages needed to compete with those offering zero fees. It will be interesting to see if Hyperliquid will have to offer zero fees as well.
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