Perp DEX Middle Field of War: Lost, Self-Saving and Later
By Zhou, ChainCatcher
The trade volume of Hyperliquid last week reached about $15 billion, with large commodity-related contracts such as crude oil, gold and silver becoming the main driving force。
As oil prices fluctuate sharply, single-day trading volumes of crude oil in Hyperliquid exceed $2.2 billion, after bitcoin。
THE SITUATION IN IRAN ESCALATED, THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ WERE RUSHED, CME CLOSED ON WEEKENDS, AND GLOBAL TRADERS ENTERED A CHAIN OF CENTRALIZED EXCHANGES SEEKING PRICE DISCOVERY。
At the same time, GMX Labs, which used to occupy nearly a quarter of the market for decentralised permanence contracts, is openly recruiting CEOs, recognizing that the early founder-driven model has become unsustainable and seeking a transition to traditional leadership structures。
One is taking over the spillover demand from traditional finance, while the other is rebalancing。
Why did GMX and dYdX fail
Looking at the GMX Labs announcement, CEO candidates cover DeFi, CeFi, traditional finance and science and technology industries, with a base remuneration of between US$ 150,000 and US$ 200,000 paid in stable currency, with performance directly linked to the increase in agreed costs. The proposal was adopted by 96.42 per cent in the DAO governance vote。
A decentrization agreement, with overwhelming community consensus, decided to introduce a career manager in the traditional sense. This means that communities have realized that the old grass-roots model is no longer viable and that the solution they can think of is to move closer to traditional business management。
the situation of dYdX is even worse. At the beginning of 2023, dYdX occupied 73 per cent of the market for the decentre lasting contract, almost the size of a single household; by the end of 2024, that figure had fallen to single digits and its currency prices had fallen by more than 90 per cent。
Today, the news of the two agreements in the media is not product upgrading or market share, but token buyback. The strategic focus of an agreement has shifted fundamentally when it focuses on preserving the value of tokens rather than winning market shares。
The reasons for the decline of GMX and dYdX are complex。
The first is the point of departure. OKX Ventures reports that in 2021 dYdX mined by trade to push a single-day trade to about $9 billion, once exceeding Coinbase. This figure is generated by token incentives, and users are rewarded with brushes, not real transactions。
The more serious consequence is not that the data are false per se, but rather that the team responds to false user feedback as a real product signal, and the iterative direction has been lost from the beginning。
THE SECOND IS THE QUESTION OF ARCHITECTURE. GMX FOLLOWS THE MODEL OF A MULTI-ASSET LIQUIDITY POOL PLUS A PREDICTOR. THE DESIGN WAS JUSTIFIED IN 2021, WHEN THE AMM MODEL WAS A VIABLE OPTION, WITH THE ORDER BOOK RUNNING ON THE TAIFENG CHAIN。
THE ARCHITECTURE, HOWEVER, HAS A QUANTIFIED CEILING, AND THE TOTAL OPEN CONTRACT SIZE THAT THE AGREEMENT CAN CARRY IS APPROXIMATELY FIVE TIMES AS LARGE AS TVL, WHOSE CEILING LOCKS THE UPPER LIMIT OF THE TRADING SCALE。
LP IS NATURALLY AT AN INFORMATION DISADVANTAGE IN THIS MODEL, ACTING AS A COLLECTIVE COUNTERPART TO ALL TRADERS WITHOUT THE CAPACITY TO PROACTIVELY MANAGE RISKS, AND PROFESSIONAL MARKETERS ARE RELUCTANT TO ENTER UNDER SUCH CONDITIONS, THUS LIMITING THE DEPTH OF MOBILITY FOREVER。
dYdX saw the direction of the order book and decided to move to Cosmos to build its own application chain. The technical judgement is correct, but there are implementation problems. Following the migration, users need to adapt to new wallets and cross-chain asset bridges, and friction costs have increased significantly. More critically, the V4 version of protocol costs go to certifyers rather than token holders, and the community perception of growth dividends is zero。
The third point is the judgement of the winner. The GMX bet on a mobility model, dYdX bet on a chain, but there are only two real winning points on this track: performance, and density of the business environment。
OKX Ventures notes that most of the permanent DEX simply shifted the risk of centralization from the trust level to the less visible level of implementation and liquidation, and that decentrization was treated as a narrative rather than a real product problem to be addressed。
dYdX has turned to a synthetic stock contract for sustainability, open to United States users, by exchanging compliance for living space and bypassing positive competition. GMX is recruiting CEOs to cover strategic debt with organizational upgrades. These are the right self-help actions, but they are still dealing with the results, not the causes。
The logic of the late
When Hyperliquid went online in 2023, GMX and dYdX remained the main players on this track. It has no financing, no endorsement of the VC and no large-scale publication。
EARLY GROWTH WAS SLOW. THERE ARE NO TOKEN INCENTIVES TO BRUSH, LIMITED NUMBERS OF TRADERS AND MARKETERS ACCUMULATED DURING COLD START-UP, AND LONG-TERM POOR PLATFORM DATA. THE PROFITS AND LOSSES OF THE HLP TREASURY ARE DETECTED IN REAL TIME ON THE CHAIN, ATTRACTING PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO PUT MONEY IN IT, BUT AT THAT TIME THIS WAS NOT AN OBVIOUS ADVANTAGE。
On the technical route, the founder, Jeff, chose from the outset to build his own L1 and make a complete chain order book. The logic behind this is that, through a fully transparent chain environment, marketers are able to identify different types of transaction flows and thus adjust their pricing strategies。
This approach makes it impossible for it to follow the dYdX migration application chain, or to follow the GMX path of relying on the prophecies, but to rebuild from the bottom. Although the doctrine remains controversial within the industry, it provides a clear lead to the direction of Hyperliquid ' s products。
ON THE LAYOUT OF TRADITIONAL ASSETS, THE HIP-3 CAME ONLINE IN OCTOBER 2025, USING ENCRYPTED ASSETS TO ACCUMULATE INTO MARKETED ECOLOGY, FOLLOWED BY GOLD, SILVER AND CRUDE OIL。
The report states that when dYdX introduced the unlicensed traditional asset market in 2024, the daily turnover of Tesla synthetic shares was $4,000 and that Turkish lira was zero. Without the presence of a businessman, the assets are zero。
And Hyperliquid’s approach was to expand asset classes once the marketer had matured, so when the Iranian crisis erupted, it caught up with the trade volume。
According to CoinGecko, the size of Hyperliquid still exceeds the sum of the remaining nine out of the top 10 sustainable DEXs by about 54 per cent, Aster by about 15 per cent。
The second-ranked Aster and Hyperliquid entered almost at the same time, and why was Hyperliquid later
Aster CEO Leonard said in an interview, "When dYdX appeared, we started trying to build something on the chain, and Aster's first edition, Apollo X. Since then, the contract dex has gone through several cycles, and projects like GMX have emerged that represent an era, and we've been trying to build what the market really needs, so now we have Aster."
As he can also tell, Aster's path is gradual. From the AMM model, the order book will be added to the order book over time, and the privacy order function will be created for the limitations of the transparent market. Each step is responding to market feedback and each step is a sound product decision。
In short, it's always following the course, not defining it。
Don't publish your product too early
In the encryption industry, the technological paradigm switch is too fast, and the incremental integrity means you're always catching up to the winner of an era。
This track has been re-searched and still is。
THE ENCRYPTION INDUSTRY IS NOW NOT WELL REGARDED, AND A GREAT DEAL OF TALENT AND CAPITAL IS BEING WITHDRAWN. BUT BECAUSE PEOPLE LEAVE, THE TECHNOLOGY WINDOW WILL NOT BE FILLED QUICKLY, AND THE TIME LEFT TO THE BUILDERS WILL BE MORE ADEQUATE. EVERY TIME THE INFRASTRUCTURE IS ITERATIVE, L2 MATURES, THE APPLICATION CHAIN WORKS AND THE CHAIN ORDER BOOK CAN RUN, NEW PRODUCT POSSIBILITIES ARE OPENED。
THE PRE-EMPTIVE ADVANTAGE IS MUCH MORE VULNERABLE IN THIS INDUSTRY THAN IN TRADITIONAL INDUSTRIES, WHICH IS BOTH A RISK TO OLD PLAYERS AND A REAL OPPORTUNITY FOR NEW PLAYERS. ESPECIALLY IN THE AGE OF AI TOOLS TO LEVEL THE PRODUCTIVITY GAP, HOMOGENIZING COMPETITION IS ON THE RISE, AND IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT TO BUILD ON JUST GOOD PRODUCTS。
In summarizing the lessons of entrepreneurship over the past year, Particle's founder quoted Google founder Sergei Brin in Stanford: Don't publish your products too early. He means that once the signal is released prematurely, you are tied to a delivery line and there is no time to actually finish what you have to do。
So the real problem with starting a business is not how fast it goes, but to figure out where this track ends。
Concluding remarks
THE RECRUITMENT OF CEOS BY GMX IS NOT SIGNIFICANT, BUT MAY BE VIEWED AS A FOOTNOTE AT SOME POINT IN TIME。
THE FIRST GENERATION OF SUSTAINABLE DEX'S ENTREPRENEURSHIP DIVIDEND ENDED, AND THE AGE OF GRASS-ROOTS, FOUNDER-DRIVEN AND FAST-TEMPORALIZATION REACHED THE NODE OF PROFESSIONAL MANAGEMENT。
The new window is elsewhere, just as Hyperliquid has taken over the geopolitical situation with large commodity contracts, and the decentrization exchange is moving from internal competition in the encryption industry to a real replacement for traditional financial infrastructure, which is just beginning。
