DEXs Race to Capture Perps Market Share as Traders Move Onchain

As the rise of decentralized finance has shown, anything that centralized exchanges can do, DEXs can too – and discernibly better in many respects, not least in terms of privacy, access, and non-custodial security. But while decentralized exchanges have successfully captured a significant slice of spot volume from CEXs, futures trading has been slower to migrate due to technical challenges – but in 2025 that’s finally begun to change.

Perpetual futures – contracts without expiration dates that allow traders to speculate on assets like BTC with leverage – have long been the crown jewel of centralized exchanges. Dominated by giants like Binance and Bybit, these instruments accounted for the lion’s share of crypto derivatives, capturing more than 90% of total futures volume. However, 2025 has marked a pivotal shift as PerpDEXs have come of age.

A new wave of onchain exchanges has overcome the technical challenges to making perps work at scale, ingeniously combining deep liquidity with intent-based architecture and ever-improving UI. As a result, traders can now experience CEX-like perpetual futures on the decentralized platform and network of their choice. Not only has this made perps easier to access onchain, but it’s taken a serious chunk out of CEX volumes. For so long the kings of crypto futures trading, centralized exchanges are now anxiously eyeing what their decentralized counterparts are up to – and for good reason.

DEXs Make Their Move

In a pincer movement, decentralized exchanges have attacked their centralized rivals from multiple angles. In doing so, they’ve demonstrated that there’s more than one way to deliver onchain perps. Because as an analysis of the leading PerpDEXs shows, onchain futures can be served up a dozen different ways to suit the needs of distinct trader types and blockchain ecosystems. Many of these implementations look and feel very much like trading on a centralized exchange – they’re fast, feature-rich, and intuitive – but underneath the hood their architecture is very different. Let’s take a closer look, starting with dYdX.

dYdX’s appchain migration has unlocked greater performance in an increasingly modular DeFi world. One of the pioneers in decentralized perpetuals, dYdX has exemplified the evolution of blockchain architecture through its migration to a dedicated Cosmos appchain after initially launching on Ethereum. This shift to the Cosmos SDK has granted dYdX full control over its blockchain environment, enabling optimizations in performance, governance, and transaction costs that were previously constrained by shared infra. This has driven significant performance gains, including sub-second transaction finality and reduced latency – both of which are critical for high-frequency perps trading where milliseconds can determine profit or loss.

Post-migration, dYdX’s volume has grown significantly. This year, it’s averaged around $200 million in daily volume and open interest, hitting $500M at its peak. This growth has been supported by dYdX expanding the number of markets it supports, which now exceed 200, and seeing its MegaVault – which allows users to deposit USDC into a pool and earn trading fees – reach $12 million in TVL for liquidity. It’s taken time for dYdX to build out its perps infra, but it now has a platform that enables virtually any market to be created and traded with seamless access and no custodial risk. dYdX is a benchmark for how appchains can elevate DEX performance, drawing traders seeking CeFi-like speed without the centralization.

Depth and Diversity in Synthetics

While dYdX bets on modularity, GMX has maintained its stronghold on Arbitrum, leveraging the Layer-2’s low fees and high throughput to dominate in liquidity depth and synthetic asset expansion. GMX’s model, centered on the GLP liquidity pool, allows traders to access perpetuals backed by a diversified basket of assets, mitigating impermanent loss and ensuring deep liquidity even for exotic pairs. In 2025, GMX has expanded its synthetic offerings, adding markets for top-100 altcoins like KAS, OKB, and CVX, while venturing into real-world asset tokenization – a burgeoning $23 billion market.

This strategic diversification has sustained GMX’s lead, with features like gasless trading and multichain expansions to Solana in March 2025 enhancing accessibility. Thanks to these innovations, total volume has been trending upwards: amid a broader DeFi resurgence, GMX’s ecosystem has gained a new lease of life, supported by permissionless listings that require robust liquidity thresholds to prevent manipulation.

GMX’s edge lies in its zero-slippage trades for large positions, a feature that appeals to institutional players migrating onchain. Compared to CeFi, where funding rates can be opaque, GMX’s transparent oracle pricing and community governance foster trust. So far, GMX’s expansion into synthetic assets appears to be bearing fruit, solidifying its position as a user-friendly platform supplying EVM-based perps that work seamlessly.

Orbs’ Perpetual Hub Ultra Supercharges DEXs

Infrastructure provider Orbs, meanwhile, has been democratizing perpetuals through Perpetual Hub Ultra, its Layer-3 solution that plugs into existing DEXs like SpookySwap on Sonic and THENA on BNB Chain. This enables leverage of up to 60x on over 300 pairs, bringing CeFi-level execution to spot DEXs and saving them from the cost and security challenges of building out their own perps product from scratch; Orbs does it all for them.

The logic is compelling: mid-tier DEXs often lack the resources for advanced derivatives, but Orbs’ plug-and-play hub provides deep liquidity, aggregated order books, and intent-based trading, leveling the playing field. For SpookySwap and THENA – already Orbs partners having previously integrated solutions such as its dLIMIT protocol – this upgrade has introduced high-leverage trading on diverse assets, bringing futures markets to DEXs across the omnichain landscape.

Elsewhere, newcomers like ApeX Pro are carving out their own niche through differentiation, particularly with customizable leverage options that allow traders to tailor risk levels beyond standard caps. Operating on an orderbook model across multiple chains via its Omni platform, ApeX Pro offers up to 50x leverage with user-defined parameters, blending the precision of CeFi with DeFi’s renowned transparency and permissionless access.

In 2025, ApeX has evolved into a leading PerpDEX, with features like resellable markets from trusted sources and low-fee executions. ApeX’s real strength, though, is in user empowerment: customizable leverage reduces overexposure risks, incentivizing long-term participation. As a newer entrant, it faces liquidity bootstrapping challenges, though it’s been addressing these through partnerships and incentives. ApeX Pro has been a breath of fresh air for the onchain perps sector, proving that traders value variety and the freedom to do their thing on the network and platform that talks their language.

Onchain Perps as the New Standard

The progress made by PerpDEXs like dYdX, GMX, Orbs-integrated platforms, and ApeX Pro illustrates a maturing ecosystem where perpetual trading is no longer confined to CeFi majors. With DeFi perps volumes soaring, onchain exchanges are setting a new standard, offering transparency and non-custody that CeFi can’t match, aided by infrastructure players like Orbs making perps accessible to mid-tier DEXs. Enhanced blockchain scalability through Layer-2 solutions, improved user interfaces mimicking CeFi, and a growing distrust of centralized custodians following high-profile failures have all accelerated this transition. 

As traders prioritize sovereignty over their assets, DEXs are innovating aggressively to seize this opportunity. Everyone wants to beat the market, which for many crypto traders means opening leveraged positions that have the potential to deliver tidy profits should things play out as envisaged. While CEXs will dominate total perps volume for the foreseeable future, their market share has been significantly eroded this year. For a growing band of perps traders, DeFi is the new CeFi.