According to Coinbase researcher David Duong, 2025 saw a surge in crypto derivatives activity as traders increasingly turned to on-chain perpetual futures. By the second half of this year, decentralized exchanges were processing more than $1 trillion in monthly perpetual futures trading volume, highlighting the growing role of on-chain derivatives markets.
In a post published on X on Monday, Duong said part of this trend was the lack of a traditional altcoin season, leading traders to seek higher returns through leverage rather than the spot market. He added that the “unprecedented leverage” available with perpetual futures allows traders to increase their exposure with relatively small amounts of capital.
Duong noted that the surge in activity is primarily driven by decentralized trading platforms, with on-chain exchanges such as Aster and Hyperliquid accounting for the majority of trading volume.
sauce: David Duong
Perpetual futures (PERPs) are crypto derivatives that allow traders to gain leveraged price fluctuation exposure with no expiry date.
According to Duong, equity perpetual futures could emerge as the next growth area, as tokenized equity derivatives have the potential to combine 24/7 access and leverage to cryptocurrencies with the demand for exposure to major US stocks outside of traditional market hours.
“Nonetheless, we believe perpetual futures are evolving beyond an isolated high-leverage trading vehicle and are becoming a core, composable primitive within the DeFi market,” he said.
Competition among on-chain perpetual futures platforms intensifies
HyperLiquid launched its on-chain perpetual futures platform in late 2023 and added spot trading before gaining even broader traction in 2024. In July, the platform saw record trading volumes, with DeFiLlama data showing that the exchange processed approximately $319 billion in trades in the month.
Super liquid trading volume. sauce: Defilama
Competition in the crypto perpetual futures market has intensified over the past year. In September, shortly after its token generation event and launch, Aster recorded nearly $36 billion in 24-hour trading volume, briefly topping the decentralized perpetual futures rankings and accounting for more than half of total PERP DEX activity.
In November, Writer, an on-chain perpetual futures exchange founded in 2022 by technology entrepreneur Vladimir Novakovsky, raised $68 million in a post-launch public mainnet funding round.
According to data from DeFiLlama, on-chain perpetual futures trading volume reached approximately $972 billion in the past 30 days. During the same period, Reiter led the trading with a volume of approximately $203 billion, followed by Astor with a volume of approximately $171.8 billion and Hyperliquid with a volume of approximately $160.6 billion.
On-chain permanent exchange volume. sauce: Defilama
magazine: Introducing on-chain crypto detectives who fight crime better than the police