The year 2025 has become a period of massive inflow into decentralized finance (DeFi), with the global cryptocurrency market cap growing over 50% to reach $3.85 trillion. This surge is driven by increasing demand from institutional investors and DeFi users for transparent, decentralized, and leverage-enabled markets, making perpetual decentralized exchanges (DEXs) a new cornerstone of the crypto ecosystem.
According to the latest industry reports, perpetual DEXs now account for over 40% of total DeFi trading volume, signaling an all-time high in interest across major networks like Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, and Arbitrum. The growing trading volume and investor activity have sparked renewed focus on on-chain leverage trading, pushing platforms to offer advanced features.
By October 2025, the top perpetual DEXs by trading volume and open interest are Hyperliquid, Aster, Lighter, EdgeX, and Drift Protocol. These platforms foster user engagement through liquidity mechanisms, funding markets, and sophisticated trading tools, creating a more stable on-chain economy with recurring volume and continuous liquidity cycles compared to spot DEXs.
Hyperliquid has emerged as a pioneer, leading in open interest with $15 billion and maintaining a daily trading volume above $9 billion. Its hybrid design, which combines an advanced off-chain orderbook with on-chain verification, ensures lightning-fast performance and near-instant settlement times, placing it at the top of DeFi rankings for liquidity and open interest.
Lighter, built on a custom Ethereum Layer-2 for derivatives, holds the second position with $10.13 billion in daily trading volume. Its unique zero-fee trading model has garnered massive attention from retail traders, contributing to institutional DeFi adoption.
Aster dominates the market with over $42 billion in daily volume, exceeding the combined volumes of Hyperliquid, EdgeX, and Lighter. Through aggressive airdrop events and high-leverage instruments allowing up to 1000x leverage on various assets with minimal slippage, Aster attracts speculative traders with a high volume-to-open-interest ratio.
Meanwhile, Base Chain, a fast-expanding Layer-2, is poised to unlock similar potential with the launch of BasePerp in Q1 2026. As the first perpetual DEX on Base, it aims to merge scalable infrastructure with deep on-chain liquidity. Analysts project a new wave of DeFi developers and institutional capital that could raise Base's total value locked (TVL) to $7-9 billion by mid-2026, further catalyzing blockchain adoption and growth in perpetual markets.
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