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The Perp DEX Race After Hyperliquid: Real Volume, Farmed Volume and the Marketing Lessons

Aster, Lighter and edgeX each used points and incentives to challenge Hyperliquid, and each briefly looked like it was winning the perp DEX race. A year later the numbers show which volume was real and what a marketer should take from it.

By Zayn, Growth research team··7 min read

Key takeaways

  • Points programs pushed decentralized perpetual futures volume to a record of about $1.2 trillion in October 2025, when Lighter briefly led with 27% of the market and Hyperliquid's share fell to 10%, according to The Block.

  • Much of that volume did not last. Lighter's weekly volume fell from $74.9 billion in mid-November 2025 to $25.3 billion after its $675 million airdrop, and by 25 October 2026 Hyperliquid again held 42% of daily perp DEX volume and 57% of open interest, according to Castle Labs.

  • Open interest, fees, unique traders and retention after rewards end are better signals than volume. For marketers the lesson is that points buy activity, not loyalty, and that verifiable data is now part of the pitch.

For about two months in late 2025, the perp DEX market looked like it was about to change hands. A perp DEX is a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures, contracts that let traders bet on a price with borrowed money and no expiry date. Hyperliquid had built the category's first breakout business, which we covered in our article on Hyperliquid's growth strategy. Then a wave of challengers arrived with points programs, zero fees and airdrop promises, and the volume rankings flipped.

At AnkhLabs we think this race is one of the clearest case studies in crypto of what incentives can and cannot buy. This piece looks at what Aster, Lighter and edgeX did and what the data says a year later. It also covers how to tell real volume from farmed volume, and what any team planning a points program should learn from it.

What happened in the perp DEX race?

The mechanics were simple. A points program gives traders points for activity, usually volume, deposits or referrals, and the market assumes those points will later convert into a token airdrop. Because the conversion rate is unknown, traders estimate it. That estimate drives how much they are willing to trade to earn more points, often at a loss on fees. That makes points a cheap way to buy activity before a token exists, and an expensive one afterwards, because the bill arrives as token supply.

The challengers arrived fast. In September 2025 total perp DEX volume passed $1 trillion in a month for the first time, with Aster leading on more than $420 billion and Hyperliquid second on $282.5 billion, The Block reported. October was bigger still. According to The Block, volume hit a record of about $1.2 trillion, Lighter became the leading venue with a 27% share, and Hyperliquid's share fell to 10% from 33% a month earlier. Aster and edgeX also posted record months.

The Block was clear about the cause. Nearly every leading platform was running a points program expected to turn into an airdrop. Aster had a distribution pipeline supported by BNB Chain and Binance, and Lighter charged zero maker and taker fees, so neither side of a trade paid. On 10 October a liquidation cascade, in which a sharp price move forced one borrowed-money position after another to close, added a burst of forced trading on top.

Each challenger took a slightly different route. Aster leaned on the Binance ecosystem and its own ASTER token. Lighter competed on zero fees and a points program ahead of its token. edgeX is backed by the trading firm Amber Group and launched its EDGE token on 31 March 2026, with an airdrop it said would reward real traders. The playbook was the same underneath. Pay traders to move their volume, in points that might become tokens.

Where does the perp DEX market stand in October 2026?

A year on, the order looks a lot like it did before the race began. In late August 2026 Hyperliquid held about 58% of 30-day volume across the top eight decentralized perpetual exchanges, Crypto Briefing reported. The Castle Labs daily ranking for 25 October 2026 shows a similar picture.

Venue

24h volume

Share of volume

Open interest

Share of open interest

Hyperliquid

$4.98B

42%

$7.57B

57%

Lighter

$1.93B

16%

$742.7M

5.6%

Aster

$1.01B

8.4%

$1.41B

11%

Variational

$764.1M

6.4%

$939.1M

7.0%

edgeX

$468.9M

3.9%

$131.5M

1.0%

Source: Castle Labs perp DEX rankings, data as of 25 October 2026. Volume is venue-reported via CoinGecko and open interest comes from DefiLlama, across 25 tracked venues with $11.96 billion in combined daily volume.

The gap between the two columns is the story. Hyperliquid has 42% of the day's trading but 57% of the money actually held in open positions. Lighter has 16% of volume but less than 6% of open interest. Aster sits closer to balance than it did a year ago.

How can you tell real perp DEX volume from farmed volume?

Volume is the easiest number to inflate. A trader farming points can open and close the same position all day, or trade against themselves from two accounts, and every round trip counts. Here are the checks analysts use.

  • Volume compared with open interest. Open interest is the value of positions people keep open, and it is harder to fake. In April 2025 K33 Research analyst David Zimmerman put Lighter's volume-to-open-interest ratio at around 27. He linked it to possible wash trading, where the same party sits on both sides of a trade, or to incentive-driven activity. Using the Castle Labs figures above, the same ratio on 25 October 2026 was about 0.7 for Hyperliquid and Aster, about 2.6 for Lighter and about 3.6 for edgeX. Castle Labs notes that its volume and open interest come from different sources, so treat these as rough.

  • Correlation with other venues. In October 2025 DefiLlama removed Aster's perpetuals volume from its dashboards after its founder 0xngmi found that Aster's volume had begun closely tracking Binance's. "Until we can get that data to verify if there's washtrading, aster perp volumes will be delisted," he wrote. The ASTER token fell about 10% that day.

  • Fees and revenue. Volume that pays real fees is more likely to be real. Zero-fee venues make this check harder, which is worth knowing when comparing them.

  • Unique and returning traders. A venue with huge volume from a few thousand wallets is a different business from one with the same volume spread across many traders who come back every week. Wallet-level data on dashboards such as Dune can show how concentrated activity is, and whether the same addresses keep trading once a season ends.

  • What happens after the rewards. The cleanest test is to stop paying and watch. Lighter airdropped LIT tokens worth $675 million at the end of December 2025. Its weekly volume then fell from a mid-November peak of $74.9 billion to $25.3 billion, ForkLog reported on 19 January 2026, citing CryptoRank.

None of this proves any single trade was fake. It shows that incentive-driven volume behaves differently from organic trading, and that it moves when the incentive moves.

What did the challengers get right?

It would be wrong to call the race a failure for the challengers. Lighter still had the second-largest daily volume on 25 October 2026, and Aster held 11% of open interest, more than any rival except Hyperliquid. Points programs did what they were designed to do. They made traders try a new venue, and some of those traders stayed.

The better challengers also moved from paying for volume toward giving token holders a share of revenue. In June 2026 Aster said it would send 99% of daily platform fees to buying back its token, with purchases spread across the day and settled onchain, CryptoPotato reported. Our article on token buybacks explains why that shift matters and where it falls short.

What are the marketing lessons from the perp DEX race?

The perp DEX race compressed a whole cycle of incentive marketing into one year. Five lessons apply far beyond trading venues.

  • Points buy activity, not loyalty. Points are a tool for getting users to try a product. Plan for the week after the airdrop, because that is when you find out what you built. Our guide to crypto points programs covers how to design for that week.

  • Reward the behaviour you want to keep. If you pay for volume, you get volume. Rewarding open interest held over time, fees paid or consistent trading days attracts users who look more like real customers. Our piece on sybil detection covers the farmers you will attract either way.

  • Verifiable data is part of the pitch. Aster's delisting showed that a volume number nobody can check becomes a liability. Make order-level data available to the aggregators traders trust, and lead your marketing with metrics that are hard to fake.

  • Distribution beats features in the short run. Aster's early lead came partly from the Binance and BNB Chain pipeline The Block described. A challenger without that kind of partner has to build its own, through creators, communities and integrations.

  • The token launch is a trust test. When edgeX closed comments on its countdown post on X, community members criticised the team for a lack of transparency about the airdrop, according to crypto.news. Silence at launch reads as something to hide. Our TGE marketing plan covers how to handle that moment.

What we'd tell a founder launching a perp DEX

First, decide what success looks like after incentives end, and report it. Retained traders, open interest and fees per active trader will matter to users and investors long after the volume charts are forgotten. For Mythical Forest we built a points-driven programme with referrals and rewards tied to sustained activity, which onboarded 1M+ users. Tying rewards to sustained activity is the part that transfers to trading venues.

Second, market to traders on trading substance. For Bitget we built content around trading topics, and it brought 10,000+ new followers at a 3.8% click-through rate. Traders respond to market insight, product depth and execution quality, not to slogans about being the next Hyperliquid.

Third, plan your launch around a clear, honest story about volume. Expect analysts to run the checks above on day one. Our go-to-market strategy work starts by deciding which numbers you can stand behind, and more examples are in our case studies.

If you are planning a perp DEX launch or a points program and want a second opinion, talk to AnkhLabs.

The bottom line

The race after Hyperliquid showed that incentives can move the volume rankings within weeks, and that they rarely hold them. Hyperliquid's lead in open interest, and the fall in challenger volume after airdrops, suggest that traders keep their money where execution and liquidity are best. The challengers that last will be the ones that turn farmed activity into real traders before the rewards run out.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Figures are as of 26 October 2026 unless stated.

← Articles

The Perp DEX Race After Hyperliquid: Real Volume, Farmed Volume and the Marketing Lessons

Aster, Lighter and edgeX each used points and incentives to challenge Hyperliquid, and each briefly looked like it was winning the perp DEX race. A year later the numbers show which volume was real and what a marketer should take from it.

By Zayn, Growth research team··7 min read

Key takeaways

  • Points programs pushed decentralized perpetual futures volume to a record of about $1.2 trillion in October 2025, when Lighter briefly led with 27% of the market and Hyperliquid's share fell to 10%, according to The Block.

  • Much of that volume did not last. Lighter's weekly volume fell from $74.9 billion in mid-November 2025 to $25.3 billion after its $675 million airdrop, and by 25 October 2026 Hyperliquid again held 42% of daily perp DEX volume and 57% of open interest, according to Castle Labs.

  • Open interest, fees, unique traders and retention after rewards end are better signals than volume. For marketers the lesson is that points buy activity, not loyalty, and that verifiable data is now part of the pitch.

For about two months in late 2025, the perp DEX market looked like it was about to change hands. A perp DEX is a decentralized exchange for perpetual futures, contracts that let traders bet on a price with borrowed money and no expiry date. Hyperliquid had built the category's first breakout business, which we covered in our article on Hyperliquid's growth strategy. Then a wave of challengers arrived with points programs, zero fees and airdrop promises, and the volume rankings flipped.

At AnkhLabs we think this race is one of the clearest case studies in crypto of what incentives can and cannot buy. This piece looks at what Aster, Lighter and edgeX did and what the data says a year later. It also covers how to tell real volume from farmed volume, and what any team planning a points program should learn from it.

What happened in the perp DEX race?

The mechanics were simple. A points program gives traders points for activity, usually volume, deposits or referrals, and the market assumes those points will later convert into a token airdrop. Because the conversion rate is unknown, traders estimate it. That estimate drives how much they are willing to trade to earn more points, often at a loss on fees. That makes points a cheap way to buy activity before a token exists, and an expensive one afterwards, because the bill arrives as token supply.

The challengers arrived fast. In September 2025 total perp DEX volume passed $1 trillion in a month for the first time, with Aster leading on more than $420 billion and Hyperliquid second on $282.5 billion, The Block reported. October was bigger still. According to The Block, volume hit a record of about $1.2 trillion, Lighter became the leading venue with a 27% share, and Hyperliquid's share fell to 10% from 33% a month earlier. Aster and edgeX also posted record months.

The Block was clear about the cause. Nearly every leading platform was running a points program expected to turn into an airdrop. Aster had a distribution pipeline supported by BNB Chain and Binance, and Lighter charged zero maker and taker fees, so neither side of a trade paid. On 10 October a liquidation cascade, in which a sharp price move forced one borrowed-money position after another to close, added a burst of forced trading on top.

Each challenger took a slightly different route. Aster leaned on the Binance ecosystem and its own ASTER token. Lighter competed on zero fees and a points program ahead of its token. edgeX is backed by the trading firm Amber Group and launched its EDGE token on 31 March 2026, with an airdrop it said would reward real traders. The playbook was the same underneath. Pay traders to move their volume, in points that might become tokens.

Where does the perp DEX market stand in October 2026?

A year on, the order looks a lot like it did before the race began. In late August 2026 Hyperliquid held about 58% of 30-day volume across the top eight decentralized perpetual exchanges, Crypto Briefing reported. The Castle Labs daily ranking for 25 October 2026 shows a similar picture.

Venue

24h volume

Share of volume

Open interest

Share of open interest

Hyperliquid

$4.98B

42%

$7.57B

57%

Lighter

$1.93B

16%

$742.7M

5.6%

Aster

$1.01B

8.4%

$1.41B

11%

Variational

$764.1M

6.4%

$939.1M

7.0%

edgeX

$468.9M

3.9%

$131.5M

1.0%

Source: Castle Labs perp DEX rankings, data as of 25 October 2026. Volume is venue-reported via CoinGecko and open interest comes from DefiLlama, across 25 tracked venues with $11.96 billion in combined daily volume.

The gap between the two columns is the story. Hyperliquid has 42% of the day's trading but 57% of the money actually held in open positions. Lighter has 16% of volume but less than 6% of open interest. Aster sits closer to balance than it did a year ago.

How can you tell real perp DEX volume from farmed volume?

Volume is the easiest number to inflate. A trader farming points can open and close the same position all day, or trade against themselves from two accounts, and every round trip counts. Here are the checks analysts use.

  • Volume compared with open interest. Open interest is the value of positions people keep open, and it is harder to fake. In April 2025 K33 Research analyst David Zimmerman put Lighter's volume-to-open-interest ratio at around 27. He linked it to possible wash trading, where the same party sits on both sides of a trade, or to incentive-driven activity. Using the Castle Labs figures above, the same ratio on 25 October 2026 was about 0.7 for Hyperliquid and Aster, about 2.6 for Lighter and about 3.6 for edgeX. Castle Labs notes that its volume and open interest come from different sources, so treat these as rough.

  • Correlation with other venues. In October 2025 DefiLlama removed Aster's perpetuals volume from its dashboards after its founder 0xngmi found that Aster's volume had begun closely tracking Binance's. "Until we can get that data to verify if there's washtrading, aster perp volumes will be delisted," he wrote. The ASTER token fell about 10% that day.

  • Fees and revenue. Volume that pays real fees is more likely to be real. Zero-fee venues make this check harder, which is worth knowing when comparing them.

  • Unique and returning traders. A venue with huge volume from a few thousand wallets is a different business from one with the same volume spread across many traders who come back every week. Wallet-level data on dashboards such as Dune can show how concentrated activity is, and whether the same addresses keep trading once a season ends.

  • What happens after the rewards. The cleanest test is to stop paying and watch. Lighter airdropped LIT tokens worth $675 million at the end of December 2025. Its weekly volume then fell from a mid-November peak of $74.9 billion to $25.3 billion, ForkLog reported on 19 January 2026, citing CryptoRank.

None of this proves any single trade was fake. It shows that incentive-driven volume behaves differently from organic trading, and that it moves when the incentive moves.

What did the challengers get right?

It would be wrong to call the race a failure for the challengers. Lighter still had the second-largest daily volume on 25 October 2026, and Aster held 11% of open interest, more than any rival except Hyperliquid. Points programs did what they were designed to do. They made traders try a new venue, and some of those traders stayed.

The better challengers also moved from paying for volume toward giving token holders a share of revenue. In June 2026 Aster said it would send 99% of daily platform fees to buying back its token, with purchases spread across the day and settled onchain, CryptoPotato reported. Our article on token buybacks explains why that shift matters and where it falls short.

What are the marketing lessons from the perp DEX race?

The perp DEX race compressed a whole cycle of incentive marketing into one year. Five lessons apply far beyond trading venues.

  • Points buy activity, not loyalty. Points are a tool for getting users to try a product. Plan for the week after the airdrop, because that is when you find out what you built. Our guide to crypto points programs covers how to design for that week.

  • Reward the behaviour you want to keep. If you pay for volume, you get volume. Rewarding open interest held over time, fees paid or consistent trading days attracts users who look more like real customers. Our piece on sybil detection covers the farmers you will attract either way.

  • Verifiable data is part of the pitch. Aster's delisting showed that a volume number nobody can check becomes a liability. Make order-level data available to the aggregators traders trust, and lead your marketing with metrics that are hard to fake.

  • Distribution beats features in the short run. Aster's early lead came partly from the Binance and BNB Chain pipeline The Block described. A challenger without that kind of partner has to build its own, through creators, communities and integrations.

  • The token launch is a trust test. When edgeX closed comments on its countdown post on X, community members criticised the team for a lack of transparency about the airdrop, according to crypto.news. Silence at launch reads as something to hide. Our TGE marketing plan covers how to handle that moment.

What we'd tell a founder launching a perp DEX

First, decide what success looks like after incentives end, and report it. Retained traders, open interest and fees per active trader will matter to users and investors long after the volume charts are forgotten. For Mythical Forest we built a points-driven programme with referrals and rewards tied to sustained activity, which onboarded 1M+ users. Tying rewards to sustained activity is the part that transfers to trading venues.

Second, market to traders on trading substance. For Bitget we built content around trading topics, and it brought 10,000+ new followers at a 3.8% click-through rate. Traders respond to market insight, product depth and execution quality, not to slogans about being the next Hyperliquid.

Third, plan your launch around a clear, honest story about volume. Expect analysts to run the checks above on day one. Our go-to-market strategy work starts by deciding which numbers you can stand behind, and more examples are in our case studies.

If you are planning a perp DEX launch or a points program and want a second opinion, talk to AnkhLabs.

The bottom line

The race after Hyperliquid showed that incentives can move the volume rankings within weeks, and that they rarely hold them. Hyperliquid's lead in open interest, and the fall in challenger volume after airdrops, suggest that traders keep their money where execution and liquidity are best. The challengers that last will be the ones that turn farmed activity into real traders before the rewards run out.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Figures are as of 26 October 2026 unless stated.