Written by: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Last week, Hyperliquid's trading volume reached approximately 15 billion dollars, with commodity-related contracts such as crude oil, gold, and silver being the main driving forces.

As oil prices fluctuated sharply, the trading volume of perpetual contracts for crude oil on Hyperliquid exceeded 2.2 billion dollars in a single day, second only to Bitcoin.

The escalation of the situation in Iran created urgency in the Strait of Hormuz, and with CME closing over the weekend, global traders flocked to a decentralized exchange on-chain seeking price discovery.

Meanwhile, GMX Labs, which once held nearly a quarter of the decentralized perpetual contracts market, is publicly recruiting a CEO, acknowledging that the early founder-driven model is no longer sustainable and seeking to transition to a traditional leadership structure.

One is taking advantage of the overflow demand in traditional finance, while the other is still rebuilding from the ground up.

Why Did GMX and dYdX Fail?

Looking closely at GMX Labs' announcement, the scope of CEO candidates includes those from DeFi, CeFi, traditional finance, and technology industries, with a base salary of 150,000 to 200,000 dollars paid in stablecoins, with performance directly linked to protocol fee growth. The proposal passed with 96.42% approval in the DAO governance vote.

A decentralized protocol, with overwhelming community consensus, decided to introduce a traditional professional manager. This signifies that the community has realized the existing ad-hoc structure can no longer hold, and the solution they could think of is to align more closely with traditional corporate management.

dYdX's situation is even more dire. At the beginning of 2023, dYdX captured 73% of the decentralized perpetual contracts market, almost monopolizing it; by the end of 2024, that figure had dropped to single digits, and its token price fell over 90%.

Today, the news appearing about both protocols in the media is not about product updates or market share but rather about token buybacks. When a protocol focuses its main energy on maintaining token value rather than gaining market share, its strategic focus has fundamentally shifted.

The decline of GMX and dYdX is due to a complex set of reasons.

First is the starting point issue. A report by OKX Ventures shows that in 2021, dYdX pushed its daily trading volume to around 9 billion dollars through trading mining, temporarily surpassing Coinbase. This figure was inflated by token incentives, where users manipulated volume to earn rewards rather than engage in real trading.

The more serious consequence isn't the falsification of data itself, but that the team treated this false user feedback as real product signals, causing the iteration direction to skew from the outset.

Secondly, there is the structural issue. GMX adopts a multi-asset liquidity pool model along with oracle pricing. This design was reasonable in 2021, when the order book could not function on the Ethereum chain, making the AMM model a viable choice.

However, this structure has a quantifiable ceiling; the total open contract size that the protocol can sustain is about five times its TVL, which caps the trading scale based on its TVL.

LPs in this model are naturally at an information disadvantage, acting as the collective counterparty to all traders, yet without the ability to actively manage risk, and professional market makers are reluctant to enter under these conditions, resulting in perpetually limited liquidity depth.

dYdX recognized the value of the order book model and decided to migrate to a self-built application chain on Cosmos. The technical judgment was correct, but the execution faced issues. After migrating, users had to readapt to new wallets and cross-chain asset bridges, leading to significantly increased friction costs. More critically, in the v4 version, the protocol fees flowed to validators instead of token holders, rendering the community's perception of growth dividends to zero.

The third point is regarding the judgment of decisive victory points. GMX bet on the liquidity model, while dYdX bet on a self-built chain, but there are only two real decisive points in this track: performance and the density of the market maker ecosystem.

OKX Ventures notes that most perpetual DEXs simply shift centralized risks from the custody layer to the less visible execution and settlement layers, treating decentralization as a narrative rather than a genuine product problem to solve.

dYdX's move to implement synthetic stock perpetual contracts and open to US users is a way of exchanging compliance for survival space, sidestepping direct competition. GMX's recruitment of a CEO is an organizational upgrade to make up for the shortcomings in strategic judgment. These are all valid self-rescue actions, but they are still addressing results instead of handling the causes.

The Logic of Newcomers

When Hyperliquid launched in 2023, GMX and dYdX were still the dominant players in this field. It had no financing, no VC backing, and no large-scale launch activities.

Early growth was very slow. Without token incentives to inflate the volume, the number of traders and market makers accumulated during the cold start period was limited, and platform data remained poor for a long time. The profits and losses of the HLP vault are available for real-time checks on-chain, attracting those willing to invest real money, but at that time, this was neither an apparent advantage.

On the technical front, founder Jeff chose to build an L1 from the start, creating a complete on-chain order book. The underlying logic is to allow market makers to identify different types of trading flows and adjust pricing strategies through a completely transparent on-chain environment.

This thinking determined that it could not follow dYdX's path of migrating to an application chain, nor rely on GMX's oracle pricing, and could only rebuild from the ground up. Although this theory remains controversial in the industry, it provided a clear main line for Hyperliquid's product direction.

Regarding traditional assets, HIP-3 is set to launch in October 2025, initially accumulating a market maker ecosystem with cryptocurrencies before sequentially introducing gold, silver, and crude oil.

The report indicates that when dYdX launches a permissionless market for traditional assets in 2024, the daily trading volume of Tesla synthetic stocks was 4,000 dollars, and the Turkish lira was 0. Without market makers present, asset launches equated to zero.

Hyperliquid's approach is to expand asset categories only after the market maker ecosystem matures; hence when the Iran crisis erupted, it caught the wave of trading volume.

Image Source: RootData

According to CoinGecko data, as of March 26, in terms of the 24-hour open contracts calculated, Hyperliquid accounted for about 54% among the top ten perpetual DEXs, with Aster ranking second at around 15%, and Hyperliquid's scale still exceeds the combined total of the other nine.

Why did Hyperliquid surpass the second-ranked Aster, which entered the market almost simultaneously?

Aster CEO Leonard stated in an interview, "When dYdX emerged, we began attempting to build our own on-chain products, and Aster's first version appeared, which is Apollo X. Since then, perpetual contract DEXs have gone through several cycles, leading to projects like GMX that represent an era. We have always tried to create what the market truly needs, and that's how Aster came about."

From his words, it can be seen that Aster's path is gradual. Starting from an AMM model, it iterated step by step, adding the order book functionality, then developing privacy order features to address the limitations of a transparent market. Every step responds to market feedback, and every decision is a reasonable product decision.

Simply put, it has always followed the evolution of the track, rather than defining the evolution of the track.

Don't Release Your Product Too Soon

In the crypto industry, the speed of technological paradigm shifts is too rapid; incremental iterations mean that you are forever chasing the decisive victory points of a previous era.

There have always been people seeking answers in this track, and it remains so.

The crypto industry is currently unpopular, with many talents and capital fleeing. However, because people are leaving, the technical window will not be filled quickly, giving builders even more time. With each infrastructure iteration, as L2 matures, application chains become feasible, and on-chain order books become operational, new product possibilities are opened.

First-mover advantages are far more fragile in this industry than in traditional industries, which is both a risk for old players and a real opportunity for new ones. Especially in an era where AI tools smooth out productivity gaps, homogeneous competition is intensifying, making it increasingly difficult for just-right products to establish themselves.

When reflecting on the entrepreneurial lessons of the past year, the founder of Particle quoted a statement by Google founder Sergey Brin from Stanford: "Don't release your product too early." He meant that once you signal too early, you become tethered to a delivery timeline, leaving no time to truly finish what needs to be done.

Therefore, the real question for entrepreneurship is not how fast to run, but rather having a clear understanding of where the endpoint of this track lies.

Conclusion

The matter of GMX hiring a CEO may seem small, but it might be looked back upon as a footnote at some point in time.

The entrepreneurial dividend period of the first generation of perpetual DEXs has ended; the era of ad-hoc teams, founder-driven models, and rapid iteration has reached a node where professional management is needed.

A new window exists elsewhere, as Hyperliquid capitalizes on this wave of geopolitical trading through commodity contracts, decentralized exchanges are moving from internal competition within the crypto industry to a genuine alternative to traditional financial infrastructure, and this direction has only just begun.

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