jakiro
Source: Galaxy; Compilation: Bitchain Vision
In the past week, the hot topic in the cryptocurrency circle has been Zhao Changpeng’s latest project Aster.The decentralized exchange’s token, ASTER, went live a week ago and has now topped the list of revenue-generating agreements in the cryptocurrency sector.
DefiLlama data on September 27 showed that Aster earned nearly $14 million in 24 hours, surpassing Circle and Hyperliquid, second only to Tether ($22 million).
It’s amazing considering that most people didn’t know what Aster was before last week.
AsterDEX was born at the end of 2024 and was formed by the merger of income infrastructure provider Astherus and perpetual contract exchange APX Finance.Aster offers a range of services: Aster Pro, a premium order book perpetual contract exchange based on BNB chain, Ethereum, Solana and Arbitrum; one-click, MEV-resistant perpetual contract (1001 times leverage); a supporting spot exchange (Aster Spot); and earnings infrastructure (Aster Earn), including a earnings stablecoin (USDF).Aster’s roadmap extends further, including the Aster chain designed for low friction transactions.
The market is clearly paying attention to this trend.On September 17, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao tweeted about Aster, when the token was trading at $0.17; as of the time of writing, its price had risen to $1.60, up to 1,015%.
Our opinion:
Aster’s perpetual contract business has entered one of the biggest market opportunities in the cryptocurrency space.According to Coinglass, perpetual contracts currently have more than one trillion in monthly trading volumes, mainly focusing on centralized exchanges (CEXs) including Binance, Bybit and OKX.In contrast, the decentralized exchange (DEX)/centralized exchange (CEX) ratio for spot trading has steadily increased.Hyperliquid has proven that a streamlined perpetual contract infrastructure can scale rapidly; it is one of the biggest winners of this cycle.If the profit potential of perpetual contract decentralized exchanges (DEXs) is huge compared to their construction costs, new competitors are bound to flock.
This is exactly what we see.Lighter, BULK, edgeX, Drift, Pacifica, and Zeta all take different approaches in terms of execution and fee routing.Hyperliquid is expected to encounter more “vampire attacks” and more new participants will join.Given the huge attention on-chain perp, the DEX/CEX ratio for derivatives is likely to rise.
Against this backdrop, Aster’s strategy seems to be to broaden the moat through integration.The project, supported by YZi Labs, a venture capital arm of Binance founders, is designed to capture the entire user “session” rather than just the transaction link by integrating perpetual contracts, spot, earnings and stablecoin settlements into one place.More broadly, the focus raised by the project has ignited user activity on Binance BNB’s smart chain.
The chain reaction of competition has emerged.Hyperliquid’s HYPE token has fallen by about 30% since Aster went online.Even the “king” is inevitably affected by competitors who can attract a lot of attention.The Aster’s outbreak was largely driven by rumors and speculation about CZ and YZi Labs likely to do anything to promote the project.But this is also reality.Double your income in 24 hours is not a joke.
The challenge now lies in durability.When stories are fresh and popular, it is easier to soar in income, but maintaining attractiveness is more difficult.
