This is undoubtedly the top track for 2025.

Since November 29, 2024, when Hyperliquid airdropped tokens and ignited the entire network, this track has entered the fast lane. As a representative of the new generation of order book Perp DEX, Hyperliquid's token HYPE once soared to $50 and currently remains stable around $47, becoming one of the most compelling and wealth-generating projects this year.

The Perp DEX track not only has high income but also significant growth potential, posing an unprecedented threat to CEXs. The daily trading volume of crypto derivatives has long been 4-5 times that of spot trading, while the penetration rate of on-chain derivatives market is currently less than 10%, meaning there is at least 10 times more growth potential.

Just as there has never been only one centralized exchange, more and more teams are starting to enter the market, continuously raising the track's ceiling and intensifying competition. Various projects are continuously upgrading in technology, liquidity, depth, user experience, and incentive mechanisms. The clustering of projects and frequent innovations have brought a stronger "wealth spillover" effect, attracting substantial funds and user attention, especially for a new batch of yet-to-be-tokenized Perp DEXs.

Currently, Hyperliquid's second round of airdrop is about to launch, and other rapidly growing projects with strong team backgrounds and strong token issuance expectations are emerging. BlockBeats will list five Perp DEX dark horses that have not yet issued tokens - they are either growing rapidly, resource-rich, or backed by star VCs, and are key projects that the "airdrop hunting" army and contract players cannot miss.

edgeX

edgeX is one of the first projects incubated by Amber Group's new accelerator in July 2024, currently with extremely high heat in the Korean community and a good mobile APP experience.

As a Perp DEX built on Ethereum Layer 2 using StarkEx ZK-Rollup, edgeX can process 200,000 orders per second with order matching latency below 10 milliseconds, setting a new benchmark for speed and efficiency in decentralized derivatives exchanges. The fees are 0.038% for Maker and 0.015% for Taker.

According to the latest data, edgeX's actual revenue in the past 30 days reached $5.6 million, surpassing top Perp DEXs like GMX ($2.45 million) and dYdX ($1.23 million). Projects ranking high in revenue have more genuine capital flow, with users' fees being "real".

In terms of market depth, edgeX currently performs best among all Perp DEXs. Taking BTC/ETH as an example, at a 0.01% spread, edgeX can support a $6 million position for BTC, exceeding Hyperliquid ($5 million), Aster ($4 million), and Lighter ($1 million). Although the overall depth is slightly inferior to Hyperliquid, in most scenarios, edgeX is the Perp DEX with the best depth after Hyperliquid.

Comparison of BTC and ETH depth across platforms at a 0.01% spread

In terms of team, edgeX is backed by Amber Group, with crypto and traditional finance professionals from top institutions like Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, with over 7 years of exchange operation and trading experience.

Additionally, perhaps benefiting from Amber Group's resources, edgeX's market-making vault has more strategic design to help improve capital efficiency and risk management. In a typical Perp DEX structure, the vault serves as a central liquidity pool responsible for market-making and position liquidation. Although statistical data usually shows positive returns in quarterly cycles, the vault still faces risks of unilateral market exposure, "bankruptcy", or liquidity attack vectors.

Unlike traditional "MM Vault", edgeX's eLP (Edge Liquidity Pool) combines passive liquidity and intelligent hedging mechanisms, always providing depth for the order book and dynamically hedging large risk exposures. Meanwhile, the vault also has dynamic leverage adjustment and a dedicated insurance fund, adjusting in real-time based on profitability/leverage to prevent malicious large-scale fund operations, with 10% of each revenue going into the insurance pool to buffer potential vault losses from extreme market conditions.

Moving forward, edgeX will upgrade from the current perp app rollup (V1) to a high-performance financial chain (V2), supporting fully modular and composable financial infrastructure.

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Ethereal

Ethereal is the first native project built on the Ethena Network and the "favorite child" project of the ENA community, supported by the USDe stablecoin. Its goal is to create an all-in-one, vertically integrated DeFi platform that fully unleashes the potential of USDe. Ethereal V1 is the starting point of this vision, bringing comprehensive spot and perpetual contract functions to the upcoming Ethena network. Technically, Ethereal adopts an EVM solution, with settlement through Converge, Arbitrum execution environment, and Celestia data availability layer. The order matching latency is less than 20 milliseconds, with a peak capacity of about 1 million orders and 1,000 trades per second. In terms of liquidity, Ethereal V1 is committed to becoming the core venue for on-chain USDe fund hedging and trading. The platform has been officially approved by Ethena governance (with 99.6% support) and promises to allocate 15% of future governance tokens to ENA stakers (sENA), deeply aligning with community interests. On June 20, 2025, Ethereal officially launched its testnet, allowing users to experience the high-performance on-chain trading product supported by USDe at testnet.ethereal.trade. In the future, Ethereal will gradually launch products including spot trading, lending, loans, RWA, and more USDe-based derivative financial products, continuing to expand its DeFi ecosystem.

Paradex

Paradex was incubated by Paradigm, a crypto institutional liquidity platform (unrelated to the venture capital firm of the same name), and is built on the Paradex Network, an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain based on the Starknet Stack, positioned for high-performance decentralized trading and asset management. Although the incubator is not the well-known crypto VC Paradigm, but a crypto institutional liquidity platform with the same name, it is still worth attention. Founded in 2019, Paradigm provides services to hedge funds, market makers, and family offices, with extensive research in crypto derivatives markets like options. Initially, its work model was handling over-the-counter matching, leaving on-exchange execution, clearing, and settlement to exchanges like FTX. At its peak, it occupied 30% of the global crypto options market, raising $35 million at a $400 million valuation, with Jump Crypto and Alameda Research as co-lead investors. However, after FTX's collapse, Paradigm was also significantly impacted. After a sharp decline in trading volume, they launched Paradex to rebuild their ecosystem. Benefiting from years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's features include support for perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading. All trades are unified in one account, with any asset usable as collateral, supporting isolated margin, cross margin, and portfolio margin modes. In terms of fees, Paradex's taker fee is 0.03%, with a -0.005% rebate for limit orders. For asset management, Paradex's vault allows users to obtain LP tokens by share and can combine mainstream DeFi protocols like Pendle, Morpho, and Aave. The vault supports both active trading and passive income from Vault Trading Funds (VTF). Some LP tokens can be directly used as collateral for more on-chain strategies. Paradex's integrated lending market also allows users to borrow directly from the same account, using their portfolio as collateral. Currently, Paradex has announced its token economics, with the community having extremely high expectations for its token launch. The platform token DIME's future uses will include paying trading fees, fee discounts, staking, liquidity mining rewards, and governance/voting participation. At present, Paradex is the top-ranked options DEX in crypto, though its trading volume growth in perpetual contracts is not particularly outstanding.