Behind the heat of Aster, the entire Perp DEX track is experiencing an unprecedented competitive landscape. From technological innovation to user experience, from asset diversification to ecological integration, various projects are seeking their own differentiated breakthrough paths.

However, the most important data is undoubtedly the revenue data. From the perspective of revenue data, these projects have already demonstrated their real ability to generate income.

To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the current state of this track, we have sorted out the five most profitable Perp DEXs that have not yet issued tokens, examining how they have found their foothold in their respective niches and how they got started.

(It should be noted that this article primarily filters and analyzes projects from the perspective of protocol revenue. Some well-known Perp DEX projects, such as Lighter, although performing well in terms of trading volume and user activity, have adopted a fee model that charges 0 fees for early liquidation, making it difficult to calculate revenue data, and thus are not included in this analysis.)

1. edgeX ($49.47 million)

edgeX set a new revenue record in the perpetual DEX field in September 2025, with a cumulative total revenue of $49.47 million, firmly securing the second position in the industry. In just the past 30 days, the platform generated $20.46 million in revenue, achieving an astonishing growth of 147% compared to the $8.29 million quarterly revenue in the second quarter. This performance not only puts edgeX on track for an annualized revenue of $250 million but also allows it to capture approximately 15-20% of the market share in the fiercely competitive perpetual DEX space, making it a revenue giant second only to Hyperliquid.

In terms of technical architecture, edgeX is built on StarkWare's StarkEx zero-knowledge proof rollup technology, achieving a processing capacity of 200,000 orders per second and a matching latency of less than 10 milliseconds, directly challenging the technological moat of centralized exchanges. More notably, edgeX has demonstrated a competitive advantage in liquidity depth that surpasses its peers. Within a 0.01% price spread, edgeX's BTC trading pair can support a position size of up to $6 million, surpassing Hyperliquid's $5 million, Aster's $4 million, and Lighter's $1 million, establishing its depth advantage in medium-sized trades.

In terms of mobile experience, edgeX stands out. Its latest v2.9 mobile application integrates Privy MPC wallet technology, allowing users to start trading without memorizing complex mnemonic phrases, significantly lowering the barrier to using DeFi. The app also supports one-click deposits for USDC/Arbitrum, real-time push notifications for limit order execution, and one-click reverse positions, among other professional trading features. This design philosophy, which combines CEX-level user experience with DeFi security, has earned edgeX widespread recognition in the mobile-first Asian market.

edgeX's success is inseparable from its strong team background and strategic incubation support. As one of the first incubation projects launched by Amber Group in July 2024, the edgeX team brings together seasoned professionals from top institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bybit, with over 7 years of experience in exchange operations and product development. Amber Group, a global digital asset company managing approximately $5 billion in assets, provides edgeX with professional market-making support and deep liquidity, which is a key factor in the platform's ability to achieve over $10 million in depth in a short period.

In terms of global expansion, edgeX places special emphasis on developing the Asian market, particularly the South Korean market. During Korean Blockchain Week 2025, several community events were held, including the "edgeX CONNECTS ALL" Seoul community night and live trading competitions, garnering significant attention and participation from the South Korean DeFi community. This localized strategy, combined with multilingual support and mobile-first product design, has laid a solid foundation for edgeX to establish a foothold in the fiercely competitive Asian market.

According to community expectations, the TGE in Q4 2025 is expected to bring substantial returns to point holders, with each point potentially valued between $370 and $870 based on a 20-35% token allocation assumption. This expectation has driven explosive growth in the platform's user base and trading volume, with deposits in July even reaching a growth of 1000%.

From an investment value perspective, edgeX has demonstrated a rare self-sustaining ability, with its cumulative revenue of $49.47 million coming entirely from real trading fees, rather than token inflation or external subsidies. This sustainable business model, combined with its leading advantages in technology, user experience, and market expansion.

2. Paradex ($9.74 million)

Paradex is incubated by the crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm (unrelated to the similarly named venture capital firm) and is built on the Paradex Network, an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain based on the Starknet Stack, which is positioned for high-performance decentralized trading and asset management.

Although the incubator is not the well-known top crypto VC Paradigm, but rather the similarly named crypto institutional liquidity platform Paradigm, it is still worth attention.

Founded in 2019, Paradigm serves institutions such as hedge funds, market makers, and family offices, with extensive research in the crypto options and derivatives trading market. Initially, its business model involved handling over-the-counter matchmaking, leaving on-chain execution, clearing, and settlement to exchanges like FTX. At its peak, it held a 30% share of the global cryptocurrency options market, completing a $35 million financing with a valuation of $400 million, co-led by Jump Crypto and Alameda Research.

However, after the collapse of FTX, Paradigm, as a partner, also faced significant impacts, and after a rapid decline in trading volume, it launched Paradex to rebuild the ecosystem.

Thanks to its years of research in the derivatives market, Paradex's features include support for perpetual contracts, perpetual futures, perpetual options, and spot trading, all unified under one account, allowing any asset to be used as collateral, supporting isolated, cross, and combined margin modes.

In terms of fee structure, Paradex implements a highly competitive zero-fee model. Starting from September 10, 2025, the platform offers a completely free experience for UI traders in all perpetual markets (excluding BTC and ETH) with 0% maker fees and 0% taker fees. For API traders, the platform charges 0% maker fees and 0.02% taker fees, effectively enhancing the platform's trading activity.

By building a private Starknet instance, the team successfully wrote business logic using the Cairo programming language and deployed the blockchain within a short development cycle of just 6 months. This customized solution brings significant advantages, including a custom fee model, achieving centralized exchange-level throughput, and efficient batch order processing capabilities.

In terms of asset management, the Paradex treasury allows users to earn LP tokens based on their shares and can combine with mainstream DeFi projects like Pendle, Morpho, and Aave. The treasury supports both active trading and passive income from treasury trading funds (VTF), with some LP tokens potentially usable as collateral in the future to participate in more on-chain strategies. Additionally, the integrated lending market allows users to borrow directly using the same account, enabling combined investment portfolios to be used as collateral.

Currently, Paradex has announced its token economics, and the community has exceptionally strong expectations for its token issuance. The platform token DIME will have future uses including payment of trading fees, fee discounts, staking and liquidity mining rewards, and participation in governance/voting.

From a market performance perspective, Paradex has achieved cumulative revenue of $9.74 million, with nearly $1.28 million in revenue over the past 30 days. Trading data shows a 30-day trading volume of $9.32 billion, with a cumulative trading volume of $83.6 billion and a TVL of $92.74 million, demonstrating robust market performance.

3. Extended ($6 million)

As an emerging force in the perpetual DEX track, Extended has created impressive financial performance in just over a year. Based on its cumulative trading volume of $20.635 billion and standard fee structure, Extended's cumulative revenue is estimated to have reached $6-10 million, with approximately $1.5-2.5 million in revenue over the past 30 days. Although the platform has not yet achieved revenue tracking on major data aggregators like DefiLlama, this revenue estimate is relatively conservative and aligns with industry benchmarks based on its 0.025% taker fee and 0% maker fee (high-volume users can receive up to 0.02% rebates).

The platform's most notable innovation is its seamless integration design of "front-end EVM, back-end Starknet." Users can trade directly using EVM wallets like MetaMask without needing to install a Starknet wallet or perform complex cross-chain bridging operations. Deposits and withdrawals can be made across six major EVM chains, including Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base, BSC, Avalanche, and Polygon, while all transaction settlements are completed on Starknet. This design not only aggregates about 80% of DeFi liquidity from the EVM ecosystem but also provides users with an almost frictionless cross-chain trading experience.

The Starknet migration launched by Extended on August 12, 2025, is considered one of the most successful technical upgrade cases in DeFi history. The entire migration process was divided into three phases, lasting about a month, with users not needing to manually withdraw funds, as all migrations were completed automatically. In the first phase, both systems ran in parallel, but points were only accumulated on Starknet, effectively incentivizing early migration by users. The second phase switched StarkEx to a liquidation-only mode, while the third phase completely shut down StarkEx and forced liquidation of all remaining positions.

The success of Extended is largely attributed to its strong founding team background. CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov previously served as the head of operations for Revolut's crypto business and as a consultant at McKinsey, bringing extensive experience in crypto operations and strategic consulting. The CTO was an architect for four crypto exchanges, including the recently launched Revolut Crypto Exchange (Revolut X), while the CBO was the former chief engineer of Revolut Crypto and a major contributor to the Corda blockchain. The core motivation of this team stems from the user pain points they observed during their time at Revolut: retail users entered the crypto market during the 2021 bull market but faced the dual dilemma of poor DeFi experiences and risks associated with centralized exchanges (such as the collapse of FTX).

Extended completed a $6.5 million seed round of financing on April 30, 2024, attracting top investment institutions and well-known angel investors in the Web3 space. The lead investor, Tioga Capital Partners, is a European venture capital firm focused on Web3 investments, known for supporting outstanding European blockchain entrepreneurs. Co-investors include Semantic Ventures from Brussels, Cherry Ventures focused on fintech and Web3, and StarkWare itself participating as a technical partner. The angel investor lineup is equally impressive, featuring Lido co-founder Konstantin Lomashuk and several former executives from Revolut.

4. Ostium ($4.48 million)

Ostium Labs is a decentralized protocol focused on synthetic perpetual contract trading of real-world assets (RWA), founded by Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro in 2022. The platform is built on the Arbitrum blockchain, providing users with high-leverage on-chain trading services for traditional assets such as stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, and indices, supporting leverage of up to 200 times.

The protocol employs a dual oracle architecture: for real-world assets, it uses Ostium's self-developed pull oracle, with node operation and data aggregation handled by Stork Network; for crypto assets, it utilizes Chainlink Data Streams. The clever design ensures that oracle metadata (such as buy/sell spreads and market trading time stamps) is only written on-chain when a trade needs to be settled, reducing gas fees while maintaining sub-second latency responses.

In terms of liquidity supply, Ostium has designed a unique OLP treasury model. Liquidity providers deposit USDC into the market maker treasury and receive fungible OLP tokens. The key innovation is that the treasury only settles traders' profits and losses when the independent liquidity buffer is insufficient, meaning liquidity providers are not the default counterparties for trades, significantly reducing directional risk. The fee distribution mechanism is also carefully designed: 30% of the opening fees, along with 100% of the liquidation rewards and extension fees when collateral is insufficient, belong to OLP holders. Users can also choose to lock their deposits (for up to 365 days) to receive a "lock bonus" for a larger share of fee distribution.

In the design of the liquidation mechanism, Ostium employs a hyperbolic funding rate and skew-based opening fees to dynamically suppress one-sided positions. 100% of the liquidation rewards go to the LP treasury, ensuring that incentives for timely liquidation are aligned. The entire perpetual contract engine matches and settles on the Arbitrum chain, without proprietary off-chain order sorting, ensuring decentralization.

The founding team of Ostium Labs showcases a rare combination of cross-disciplinary expertise. CEO Kaledora Kiernan-Linn holds a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from Harvard University, with a minor in statistics, and previously interned at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, collaborating with co-CIO Bob Prince on commodity research. She has also worked at McKinsey's Berlin office and Verdad Advisers on growth stock valuation research. Based on her innovative contributions to bringing real-world asset perpetual contracts to on-chain trading, Kaledora was named a member of Forbes' 2025 30 Under 30 in Finance.

Co-founder and CTO Marco Antonio Ribeiro is currently pursuing a degree in engineering sciences and economics at Harvard University (currently on leave to start a business). He also has experience at Bridgewater Associates, serving as an investment assistant on the commodities team, focusing on macro strategies and global market analysis. Marco has achieved notable academic and technical accomplishments, winning the 2019 Harvard Hackathon UC Challenge, a bronze medal at the 30th International Biology Olympiad, and an honorable mention at the 50th International Physics Olympiad. He is also a co-founder of the Harvard Entrepreneurship Association and serves as president of the student economic research nonprofit Erevna.

The two founders met at Harvard University and began building Ostium in a hacker house in Cambridge during the period of significant commodity price fluctuations caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Their frustration with the inability to conveniently access small-scale futures positions sparked the innovative idea of synthetic perpetual contracts.

Ostium Labs completed a $3.5 million seed round of financing on October 6, 2023, which is the only publicly disclosed financing round for the company to date. This round was co-led by well-known venture capital firms General Catalyst and LocalGlobe, with participation from institutions such as Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Vessel Capital, and DeFi Alliance. The angel investor lineup is also strong, including former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, LedgerPrime CIO Shiliang Tang, Nick van Eck, Neel Somani, and other industry figures. Notably, the company has not disclosed specific valuation information to date and has not conducted additional equity or token financing rounds.

According to the latest on-chain data analysis, the Ostium protocol has shown robust growth momentum. As of September 15, 2025, the protocol's total value locked (TVL) reached $44.37 million, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $17.8 billion. In terms of user activity, there were 845 daily active users in the past 24 hours, 2,225 weekly active users in the past 7 days, and 903 monthly active users.

In terms of revenue performance, Ostium Labs has achieved cumulative revenue of $4.48 million, with nearly $722,500 in revenue over the past 30 days and a TVL of $52.9 million. The platform has effectively driven user growth through a continuous 24-week points program, demonstrating strong development potential in the RWA perpetual trading niche.

Ostium has not yet issued a native token, and the team has not confirmed specific token release plans. The current incentive mechanism primarily relies on a weekly points program (with at least 500,000 points awarded weekly), rewarding trading, liquidity provision, and referral activities, which users generally view as a potential precursor mechanism for token airdrops.

In terms of product development roadmap, Ostium has transitioned from a private beta phase in Q4 2024, during which it rebuilt its core tech stack to support long-tail real-world assets due to oracle limitations. On March 18, 2025, the protocol launched a public testnet Beta version on Arbitrum, providing phased access to over 80,000 waiting users. Upcoming milestones include gradually expanding the asset list (oil, copper, platinum, Hang Seng Index, etc.), completing third-party audits and officially launching the mainnet, and launching a second treasury to separate market-making and settlement functions.

5. Satori Finance ($2.76 million)

Satori Finance was established in 2021 and has carved out a niche in the competitive DeFi derivatives space through its unique hybrid architecture design. The platform employs a "off-chain order aggregation + on-chain settlement" technical solution, achieving centralized exchange-level execution efficiency while maintaining decentralization. The platform supports leverage trading of up to 25 times and has successfully deployed on more than 14 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, zkSync Era, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Scroll, and Polygon zkEVM.

The core of Satori Finance's technological innovation lies in its hybrid order book model design. The platform provides execution speeds close to centralized exchanges through an off-chain order aggregation matching mechanism while ensuring transparency and decentralization of trades through on-chain settlement. This design collaborates deeply with external market maker networks to build a central limit order book system with deep liquidity. In terms of fee structure, Satori Finance demonstrates significant competitive advantages, with its V2 version's maker/taker fees as low as 0.02% and 0.04%, respectively.

The founding team of Satori Finance possesses deep experience in traditional finance and the cryptocurrency industry. Co-founder and CTO George Wu served as a trader for equities, interest rates, and commodity derivatives at the leading global market maker Optiver for four years, laying a solid foundation for the platform's technical architecture and risk management system. Co-founder and CEO Rahim Noorani has extensive experience in investment banking and venture capital, having worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs and later as an investor at Scale Ventures, providing important guidance for the platform's business strategy development.

In terms of financing, Satori Finance successfully completed a $10 million seed round of financing in May 2022, receiving support from top institutions in the cryptocurrency investment field. This round was co-led by Polychain Capital and Blockchange Ventures, with participation from well-known investors such as Jump Crypto, Coinbase Ventures, Portal, Acala, Astar, Parallel, and Clover. Notably, Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood also participated as a strategic advisor in this financing round.

From the latest on-chain data, Satori Finance has shown robust growth in trading volume. The platform's 24-hour perpetual contract trading volume reached $211 million, with a 7-day trading volume of $1.402 billion and a 30-day trading volume of $5.75 billion, bringing the cumulative historical trading volume to over $97.123 billion. In terms of total value locked (TVL) distribution, the platform's total TVL is $2.23 million, with the zkSync Era chain holding the largest share at $1.31 million.

The platform's revenue growth trajectory is also noteworthy. Starting from $10,400 in fee revenue in Q3 2023, it reached $1.15 million in Q2 2025, with total revenue currently at $2.76 million.

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