Reviewing the 2025 showdown between DEX and CEX: Perp DEX is the biggest engine

Writing by: Cecelia, Deep Tide TechFlow

DEX, really going to replace CEX?

From a low market share in 2020 to a rapid increase in trading volume this year, the presence of decentralized exchanges is indeed becoming stronger and stronger.

Is the DEX counterattack really not far from us? But maybe not so soon?

Don’t rush to applaud the victory of decentralization, and don’t dismiss it with old reasons like complex processes and poor experience.

Read this report first, and you’ll know for sure.

2025: The Year DEX Liquidity Takes Off

Compared to the slow rise in the past two years, 2025 can be said to be the year when DEX liquidity truly takes off.

In terms of size and growth rate, the trading volume of DEXs has shown a clear leap, approaching nearly 4 times the previous total trading volume.

Data source: dune.com (@coinwealthly)

Breaking down by quarter, this growth wasn’t sudden.

The takeoff in 2025 is essentially a continuation of the growth trend seen in Q4 2024.

It was precisely in Q4 2024 that DEX trading activity and liquidity began to accelerate and were thoroughly amplified in the following year.

It can be said that the phase turning point for DEX occurred in Q4 2024, and 2025 continued and expanded this trend.

Looking back at the inflection point: the acceleration in Q4 2024 and the amplification in 2025

Quarterly review: Who is leading each quarter?

2024Q4: Trend Initiation

• Solana ecosystem DEX trading volume first surpassed Ethereum on a quarterly basis, with activity significantly increasing, becoming a key liquidity hub for the phase.
• AI narrative combined with new token issuance platforms, continuously creating a large number of new trading pairs, significantly boosting DEX trading frequency and total transaction volume.
• Solana DEX: Most new token trading occurred on Solana DEXs. Relying on token issuance platforms like Pump.fun’s “graduation” and “migration” processes, Raydium absorbed a large amount of new token liquidity and trading in Q4 2024, further consolidating its core position in Solana spot trading.
• Hyperliquid: Benefiting from successful HYPE airdrops and product design advantages, Hyperliquid rapidly expanded its share in the decentralized perpetual contract market, with market share exceeding 55%.

2025Q1: Ranking Shuffle and Hotspot Rotation

• The competition for the top DEXs has turned into a “stool race,” with trading volume rankings among leading ecosystems repeatedly changing, hard to distinguish.
• During the phase of active Meme and AI Meme trading, Solana ecosystem DEX trading volume rapidly expanded, temporarily leading in trading volume.
• As Meme coin trading heat cooled in March, Ethereum, with more stable liquidity and structural capital reflows, successfully reclaimed the top spot in DEX trading volume in March.
• CEX custody risk exposure: Some users began to try shifting to non-custodial, on-chain verifiable DEXs, promoting migration of trading activity.

2025Q2: Ecosystem Synergy Amplification and Capital Migration

• PancakeSwap: Binance’s Alpha project routed relevant transactions to PancakeSwap, directly boosting BSC ecosystem DEX trading activity. In this process, PancakeSwap became the biggest beneficiary of cross-ecosystem collaboration, with quarterly trading volume soaring 539.2%.
• Ethereum Pectra upgrade was officially activated, triggering strong market reactions. Ethereum surged nearly 44% in Asian morning trading, the largest single-day increase since 2021. The market focus shifted from Solana and Meme trading to broader ecosystem allocations.
• As liquidity migration accelerated, competition between Solana and BSC showed a clear siphon effect, with capital and trading activity rapidly shifting between ecosystems.

2025Q3: Intensified Competition and Product Integration

• CEX trading volume growth was more significant, driving a rebound in overall market activity.
• Uniswap: regained some market share and became a leader alongside PancakeSwap.
• Perp DEX competition heated up. Challengers like Aster, Lighter, edgeX rapidly expanded in trading volume and user base, clashing head-on with top platform Hyperliquid, pushing Perp DEX into high-intensity competition. Platforms used airdrops, points, zero fees, and other incentives to attract active traders, further amplifying on-chain derivatives trading demand.
• DEX ecosystem: DEX aggregators and infrastructure continued to improve, constantly enhancing user trading experience, retention, and trading stickiness.
• Jupiter: After launching Jupiter Lend, it attracted over $1 billion in deposits within just ten days. Previously limited lending demand within the Solana ecosystem was quickly activated. Supported by Fluid’s underlying lending architecture, Jupiter Lend’s explosion further proved the strong capital attraction of the DEX + lending model.

2025Q4: Extreme Market Turbulence and Sector Differentiation

• The extreme market movements caused by the 1011 liquidation event temporarily boosted market trading volume, with data showing phase-specific spikes. This event exposed systemic risks at the CEX level, and chain-linked loans and leverage liquidations impacted DEXs.
• Lighter and edgeX: As market confidence gradually recovered, the Perp DEX track returned to growth. Platforms like Lighter and edgeX rapidly expanded in trading volume and user base, narrowing the competition with top platform Hyperliquid, pushing the Perp DEX market into fierce competition.
• Aster: After CZ publicly disclosed holding ASTER, Aster received support from Binance, Robinhood, and other mainstream trading platforms. As a leading Perp DEX in the BSC ecosystem, Aster has the strength to compete head-to-head with top platforms like Hyperliquid on the perpetual contract DEX track.
• HumidiFi: In the spot DEX field, Uniswap’s market share has been declining since the end of Q3, with some trading volume taken over by new platforms like HumidiFi, reflecting a shift from a single dominant leader to a more dispersed multi-platform landscape.

After analyzing the best-performing dark horses each quarter, let’s further separate and look at Perp DEX and Spot DEX.

Perp DEX: The True Growth Engine of 2025

Data source: CoinGecko

Here, we specifically select data from the past three years to observe the proportion of perpetual contract trading volume of DEXs/CEXs.

It can be seen that this indicator has been trending upward throughout 2025, whereas earlier phases performed relatively average.

2025 marks the true takeoff year for Perp DEX.

According to DeFiLlama data, the total trading volume of Perp DEX in 2025 reached 7.348 trillion USD.

In comparison, from early 2021 to the end of 2024, the cumulative trading volume of perpetual contract DEXs was only 4.173 trillion USD.

That means, in 2025 alone, Perp DEX achieved about 176% net trading volume growth. The additional trading volume in one year has already significantly exceeded the total of the previous four years.

Meanwhile, since Q3 this year, trading volume has shown a clear acceleration. With increasing competition and the maturation of multiple innovative products, the entire perpetual DEX track has begun to attract sustained market capital, and liquidity levels have risen accordingly.

Data source: DeFiLlama

From initially limited size and dispersed participation to being ignited by market sentiment and capital structure, the market activity of Perp DEX is entering a new scale.

Perp Volume: Core Indicator of Capital Turnover Intensity

Data source: DeFiLlama

The strength of Perp DEX lies in how fast capital can move.

From an indicator perspective, Perp Volume (perpetual contract trading volume) is an important metric for measuring the activity of perpetual DEXs.

It reflects the capital turnover strength and usage frequency.

Looking at the increase in Perp Volume within the year:

• Hyperliquid and Lighter have maintained rapid growth since 2025, with trading activity and capital turnover efficiency expanding in tandem.
• Aster has also surged after Q3, becoming one of the fastest-growing platforms this year.
• Relatively, veteran platforms like dYdX and GMX did not rank high in the year’s incremental list. Although their total historical trading volume remains substantial, their new trading volume in 2025 is below 100M USD, with a clear slowdown in growth pace.

Open Interest: Risk Exposure and Concentration of Leading Platforms

For Perp DEXs, Open Interest (the total notional value of open contracts) is an unavoidable core indicator.

Simply put: if Perp Volume is flow, OI is stock.

Perp Volume indicates trading activity, while OI indirectly reflects whether funds are willing to hold positions on the platform.

As a derivative, its trading volume mainly reflects liquidity and matching activity; whether significant funds stay on the platform depends on OI.

From the platform side, OI reflects the protocol’s capacity to bear risk and the scale of funds;

From the user side, OI shows trading demand and capital stickiness.

Therefore, when Perp Volume already has sufficient liquidity and activity, we further select the top five protocols with outstanding OI performance.

Data source: DeFiLlama

OI concentration is extremely high. The top five protocols absorb most of the open interest, with a clear gap. The sixth-ranked protocol’s OI is about one-third of the fifth, with a direct widening gap. Perp DEXs’ capital is highly sensitive to depth, stability, and liquidation mechanisms, with positions tending to concentrate on a few mature platforms.

Post-10·11 Shock, Divergent Recovery of Perp DEXs

When trading enthusiasm wanes and risk is released, the differentiation of Perp DEXs is no longer reflected in trading scale, but in the resilience of capital retention and recovery after ATH OI.

Aster:

• After completing market hype in Q3, it demonstrated the strongest capital retention ability.
• After reaching the OI peak on October 5, even in Q4, its retention rate relative to ATH OI remained above 72% for a long time; after the 1011 event, its ecosystem recovery speed was also leading, with the most stable recovery performance.

Lighter:

• Recovery pace is also relatively fast, with current OI back to about 87% of ATH, indicating clear capital inflow.

Hyperliquid:

• Although still the largest overall, its open interest has retraced over 60% from ATH. As of now, OI has not returned to high levels, only recovering to about 61% of pre-1011 average levels, showing a significant weakening overall.

Perp Revenue Performance: Growth Differences Among Protocols with Different Positions

Since protocols can attract so much capital, the key question is: are they profitable?

This leads us back to protocol revenue.

Therefore, we select representative Perp DEX protocols,

and analyze their revenue performance and trends in the 2025 cycle.

We chose four protocols with different positioning for comparison:

• Hyperliquid: as a leading specialized Perp DEX
• Jupiter: as a multi-business platform including Perp DEX
• edgeX: as a new specialized competitor
• GMX: as an established veteran Perp DEX

Before analysis, we segment the protocols:

1. Product focus:

• Specialized Perp DEX
• Multi-business platform (Perp as one of several lines)

2. Lifecycle stage:

• New entrant
• Mature protocol
• Veteran protocol

The core purpose of this classification is to answer:

Under different positioning and stages, whose revenue growth momentum is the strongest?

It’s important to note that simply looking at absolute revenue growth does not fully depict the true trend of 2025.

Therefore, we take December 2024 as the baseline, and observe the monthly MoM revenue growth to better capture the speed and differences in protocol revenue growth.

Data source: DeFiLlama

The heatmap clearly shows that July became a key period when many protocols’ revenues grew rapidly simultaneously.

Specifically:

• edgeX showed the most prominent increase in 2025.

Although the growth slowed after September, its average annual growth rate remains high, and as a successful startup Perp DEX, its revenue performance this year is still impressive.

• Hyperliquid has entered a growth phase, with stable expansion under a high base, maintaining a high level overall, but with a slowing marginal growth rate.
• Since Jupiter mainly serves as an entry point and routing layer, its trading often occurs on underlying protocols, and fee income is shared with execution layers. Its revenue growth is noticeably slower than trading scale expansion, tending to be more stable.
• GMX’s average revenue growth rate is about 22%. As a veteran protocol, its growth mainly comes from user retention. If it can sustain this rate over the long term on its existing scale, its business model still has long-term viability.

Spot DEX: Liquidity Depth and Ecosystem Competition

Data source: CoinGecko

Compared to the previous two years, the spot trading volume ratio of DEX/CEX also rose significantly in 2025. It peaked in June and rose again in Q4.

TVL: Spot Liquidity Depth and Capital Commitment Willingness

In the Spot DEX system, TVL mainly comes from LPs providing assets to trading pools. Higher TVL indicates more capital willing to bear impermanent loss and contract risks, participate in market making, and earn fees or incentives. TVL better reflects the market’s judgment on the rules, risk structure, and long-term sustainability of spot DEXs, making it one of the core reference metrics for ranking.

Data source: Tokenterminal

Looking at TVL, Uniswap still leads with about $7.3 billion, maintaining a clear liquidity advantage in spot DEXs, continuing to serve as a core trading hub in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Fluid and PancakeSwap form the second tier, both with TVL over $2 billion, benefiting from cross-ecosystem expansion and increased BSC trading activity, with strong growth momentum this year.

Curve and Raydium are mid-tier. Curve mainly handles stablecoin and low-volatility asset trading, with stable but relatively restrained expansion; Raydium is deeply integrated with Solana, reflecting liquidity changes within a single ecosystem.

Among the top ten protocols by average TVL in 2025, Fluid showed the most significant growth, reaching about $5 billion in Q3, and PancakeSwap also experienced notable expansion during the same period.

Trading Volume: The Rise of Solana Ecosystem

Data source: DeFiLlama

This uses total annual trading volume excluding flash loans. Since flash loans often involve very small, instantaneous capital exposure to leverage larger nominal volumes, they can distort trading volume metrics. Therefore, they are excluded here to better reflect actual trading demand.

In terms of share distribution, Uniswap and PancakeSwap still dominate, accounting for over half combined, indicating that liquidity in mainstream spot DEXs remains highly concentrated among a few top protocols.

Notably, the combined share of Solana ecosystem DEXs has approached the size of Uniswap’s single protocol, indicating that Solana’s overall competitiveness in spot DEX trading has significantly improved; however, within the ecosystem, multiple protocols still remain dispersed.

P/F Fluctuations Behind 2025 Spot DEX Major Events

With such a large scale, as a key part of DeFi, is Spot DEX profitable? Let’s look at the data together.

Since this article focuses on intra-year performance, only phase changes are discussed. Meanwhile, many protocols in 2025 have introduced token buybacks, burns, fee sharing, and structural adjustments, reducing the interpretive power of FDV.

Therefore, we use the circulating market cap P/F indicator to measure how much the market is willing to pay for each unit of fees.

P/F does not directly reflect profit levels but depicts market expectations of the monetization potential of Spot DEXs under current economic activity scales.

[image]# Data source: Tokenterminal

To avoid interference from absolute size on observing other protocols’ trends, Curve is not shown in the current chart, only used for background analysis. Also, since PumpSwap and Hyperliquid Spot are difficult to attribute clearly to token value capture mechanisms, they are not included in this comparison.

Curve’s P/F level remains relatively high throughout 2025, peaking around 28 in May, then steadily declining from July to about 7. Compared to about 10 at the start of the year, overall slightly down.

It’s worth noting that Curve’s P/F is significantly higher than other protocols, mainly due to its long-term maintenance of extremely low fee levels. Its pricing curve is specifically designed for stablecoins and low-volatility assets (like stablecoins between each other, stETH/ETH, etc.), achieving very low slippage and high capital efficiency through highly optimized AMM design.

Additionally, Curve’s new YieldBasis mechanism launched in 2025 further focuses on reducing impermanent loss for LPs and ensuring liquidity provider yields.

Regarding the P/F changes of the top ten Spot DEXs in 2025, we have summarized key events that had a certain impact on P/F variation, aiming to help you review this innovative and vibrant sector in 2025.

( So, returning to the initial question, will DEX really replace CEX?

Whether it’s the leap in trading volume or the rising DEX/CEX ratio within the year, all point to one fact: DEX has become an unavoidable major trading venue.

Especially in perpetual contracts, the trading scale of Perp DEXs achieved a historic expansion in 2025. Capital turnover efficiency and the capital-carrying capacity of top platforms have also propelled the market into a new scale.

But this doesn’t mean a simple replacement. 2025 is more like the starting point of a “two-way evolution”: on one hand, DEXs are actively learning from CEXs, improving matching efficiency, trading experience, risk control, and product completeness; on the other hand, CEXs are also evolving towards DEXs, emphasizing asset self-custody, on-chain transparency, and verifiable settlement and clearing mechanisms.

Ultimately, the relationship between DEX and CEX may not be a zero-sum game. A more likely scenario is that both leverage their respective advantages at different levels and in different scenarios, jointly building the next-generation infrastructure for crypto trading and settlement.

It’s not about replacement, but about working side by side; not about confrontation, but about co-creation.

In 2025, this trend is already approaching. Will the day when a new order truly takes shape come soon?