In a message published on Monday XDuong said the trend was partly driven by the absence of a traditional altcoin season, which led to traders seeking higher returns through leverage rather than spot markets. He added that the “unprecedented degree of leverage” available in perpetual futures allowed traders to increase their exposure with relatively small amounts of capital.
Duong noted that the increase in activity was mainly driven by decentralized trading platforms, with on-chain platforms such as Aster and Hyperliquid accounting for a large portion of the volume.
Perpetual futures, or perps, are crypto derivatives that allow leveraged traders to gain exposure to price movements without an expiration date.
According to Duong, perpetual stock futures could emerge as the next growth area, as tokenized equity derivatives can combine the 24/7 access and leverage of cryptocurrencies with the demand for exposure to major U.S. stocks outside of traditional market hours.
“Nevertheless, we believe perpetual futures will evolve beyond isolated, highly leveraged trading instruments and become core, composable primitives within the DeFi markets,” he said.
Competition among onchain perpetual futures platforms is heating up
Hyperliquid launched its onchain perpetual futures platform in leave 2023 and gained wider recognition in 2024 after spot trading was added. In July, the platform posted record volume, with data from DeFiLlama showing that the exchange processed approximately $319 billion in transactions during the month.
Competition in the crypto perpetual futures market has increased over the past year. In September, shortly after the token generation event and launchAster briefly topped the decentralized perpetual futures rankings with nearly $36 billion in 24-hour trading volume, accounting for more than half of total DEX activity.
In November, Lighter, an onchain perpetual futures exchange founded by tech entrepreneur Vladimir Novakovski in 2022, raised $68 million in a funding round following the launch of its public network.
In the past 30 days facts DeFiLlama shows that onchain perpetual futures generated trading volume of approximately $972 billion. During the same period, Lighter led trading with volume of about $203 billion, followed by Aster with about $171.8 billion and Hyperliquid with about $160.6 billion.
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