The new decentralized exchange (DEX) is built on the Sui blockchain, which recently surpassed $2.6 billion in total value lock (TVL).
A new contender enters the $1 trillion perpetual DEX race
With the emergence of new players such as YZi Labs’ Aster, which debuted on the BNB Chain platform earlier this year, perpetual DEX trading volume topped $1 trillion last month. And on Wednesday, another competitor was announced as Astros, a new Sui-developed Perp DEX, quietly launched after several months in beta.
Perpetual futures or “PERPs” are futures contracts or leveraged bets on crypto assets that are not subject to contract expiry dates. Cryptocurrency derivatives firm BitMEX became a purp pioneer in 2016. Since then, this financial product has exploded in popularity and now accounts for 26% of the total crypto derivatives market, according to some reports.
(Top 5 Perp DEX ranked by open interest./Coingecko)
The surge in demand for PERP has created an increasingly lucrative sector, with multiple projects competing for market share within the ecosystem. Launched in 2023, Hyperliquid is probably the most well-known name in the Perp DEX community. Others include Leiter and the aforementioned Aster. The emergence of the Astros this week poses yet another viable threat to HyperLiquid’s dominance.
“We are not simply building another PERP DEX,” an Astros spokesperson said in a release provided to Bitcoin.com. “We are establishing the liquidity backbone that will define Sui’s place in the next decade of DeFi.”
