this must be the most obvious answer to why there are that many perpDEXes, and why @aeyakovenko is building his own now. Toly just dropped a new repo on github called Percolator, a full-on perpetuals exchange being built directly on solana. but let’s be real for a second — why do we even need so many? in the last 1.5 years, we’ve seen more than a 10 perp dexes launch: aster, lighter, reya, pacifica, extended, avantis, edgex, variational, even small zk-based ones like deriw every chain has one now, every vc is backing one, and every trader is farming one let's be real, for regular users, perps are just gambling people see screenshots of someone making $100k in a day on 50x leverage and think they can do the same they don’t care if it’s on solana, arbitrum, or some zk rollup, they just want that one lucky hit so why keep building new ones when hyperliquid already dominates volume and user attention? the reason isn’t the traders — it’s the builders they don’t want to trade on hyperliquid, they want to own their own hyperliquid users gamble for profits, builders gamble for ownership every chain wants its own casino, because perps bring the most volume, liquidity, and attention and for ecosystems, that means fees, data, and activity but here’s the truth no one likes to say: 90% of these new perp dexes will die once the points stop and the airdrop lands, most users will disappear the same wallets that traded 24/7 suddenly move on to the next campaign still, that’s how crypto evolves, through hype cycles and survival dozens of new casinos fighting for the same gamblers, hoping one of them finally builds something people actually stay for(Hanzo 🉐)