On-chain perpetual futures drive surge in crypto derivatives activity

In response to Coinbase researcher David Duong, 2025 noticed a surge in crypto derivatives exercise as merchants more and more turned to on-chain perpetual futures. By the second half of this yr, decentralized exchanges have been processing greater than $1 trillion in month-to-month perpetual futures buying and selling quantity, highlighting the rising position of on-chain derivatives markets.

In a publish revealed on X on Monday, Duong mentioned a part of this pattern was the dearth of a standard altcoin season, main merchants to hunt greater returns by way of leverage reasonably than the spot market. He added that the “unprecedented leverage” obtainable with perpetual futures permits merchants to extend their publicity with comparatively small quantities of capital.

Duong famous that the surge in exercise is primarily pushed by decentralized buying and selling platforms, with on-chain exchanges akin to Aster and Hyperliquid accounting for almost all of buying and selling quantity.

sauce: David Duong

Perpetual futures (PERPs) are crypto derivatives that permit merchants to realize leveraged worth fluctuation publicity with no expiry date.

In response to Duong, fairness perpetual futures may emerge as the subsequent progress space, as tokenized fairness derivatives have the potential to mix 24/7 entry and leverage to cryptocurrencies with the demand for publicity to main US shares exterior of conventional market hours.

“Nonetheless, we imagine perpetual futures are evolving past an remoted high-leverage buying and selling car and have gotten a core, composable primitive throughout the DeFi market,” he mentioned.

Competitors amongst on-chain perpetual futures platforms intensifies

HyperLiquid launched its on-chain perpetual futures platform in late 2023 and added spot buying and selling earlier than gaining even broader traction in 2024. In July, the platform noticed report buying and selling volumes, with DeFiLlama information exhibiting that the trade processed roughly $319 billion in trades within the month.

Tremendous liquid buying and selling quantity. sauce: Defilama

Competitors within the crypto perpetual futures market has intensified over the previous yr. In September, shortly after its token technology occasion and launch, Aster recorded practically $36 billion in 24-hour buying and selling quantity, briefly topping the decentralized perpetual futures rankings and accounting for greater than half of whole PERP DEX exercise.

In November, Author, an on-chain perpetual futures trade based in 2022 by expertise entrepreneur Vladimir Novakovsky, raised $68 million in a post-launch public mainnet funding spherical.

In response to information from DeFiLlama, on-chain perpetual futures buying and selling quantity reached roughly $972 billion prior to now 30 days. Throughout the identical interval, Reiter led the buying and selling with a quantity of roughly $203 billion, adopted by Astor with a quantity of roughly $171.8 billion and Hyperliquid with a quantity of roughly $160.6 billion.