Aster DEX Launches Privacy Layer-1 as Trading Volume Falls 76% From Peak

Decentralized perpetual exchange Aster has officially launched the mainnet of its purpose-built layer-1 blockchain for derivatives trading.

The rollout follows a phased structure. Chain Genesis is now live, with a partnership reveal scheduled for March 18. Furthermore, public staking for ASTER token holders will arrive later this week, and broader ecosystem expansion will follow.

What Is Aster Chain? 

According to the team, Aster Chain supports 100,000 transactions per second, 50-millisecond block times, and charges no gas fees. Cross-chain deposits are supported from BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana.

The chain also has default privacy. Every transaction routes through a one-time stealth address, and orders are encrypted using zero-knowledge proofs.

“Account Privacy is on by default. Your transactions settle on-chain, but no one sees them. Still verifiable, just not by everyone,” the announcement read. “Want to prove what you did? Generate a Viewer Pass. It decrypts your on-chain records for anyone you share it with. No one else can access them. Keep it SAFU.”

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ASTER Token Rallies Against a Volume Slide

The launch received public support from Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the co-founder of Binance, whose family office, YZi Labs, backs Aster. 

The announcement also sent the token higher. ASTER reached an intraday high of $0.79 yesterday, its highest price since mid-January 2026. At press time, the altcoin had pulled back to $0.74, up 0.062% on the day.

The new launch comes amid a decline in platform activity. DefiLlama showed that weekly perpetual trading volume peaked at $76.6 billion in October 2025 and has since dropped to roughly $18 billion, a contraction of over 76%. 

Total value locked (TVL) has also dipped from over $2 billion to around $949 million at press time.

Aster remains one of the top perpetual decentralized exchanges by volume, but the drop reflects mounting competitive pressure from Hyperliquid as the broader on-chain derivatives market has consolidated since its breakout period in 2025.