CoinGecko Report: Surge of 346% vs Dip of 20.8%, The Wild Rise of DEX

Original Title: The Rise of Perp DEXs

Original Source: CoinGecko

Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Introduction: The core data of CoinGecko's annual report is sufficient to illustrate the issue: DEX perpetual contract trading volume surged by 346% year-on-year, while CEX open interest dropped by 20.8% during the same period, indicating a systematic shift of funds from centralization to decentralization.

This article is not just a stack of numbers; it clearly explains why this migration is happening, why Hyperliquid can surpass Coinbase International, and what these platforms are transforming into post HIP-3.

Full Article:

By 2025, perpetual contract trading platforms—especially decentralized platforms—saw an explosion, with a total trading volume of $92.9 trillion (a 64.6% year-on-year increase), fundamentally shifting the crypto market from spot trading to a derivatives-dominated price discovery mechanism.

Key Points:

· DEX perps grew by 346% to reach $6.7 trillion; meanwhile, CEX open interest dropped by 20.8%. This represents a large-scale capital migration from centralization to decentralized infrastructure primarily driven by platforms like Hyperliquid (ranked 7th globally with a volume of $2.9 trillion).

· Capital efficiency drove adoption: Perps allow traders to leverage exposure with less capital, profit in both directions (vital during the Q4 2025 downturn), and mitigate the friction of physical settlement.

· HIP-3 achieved permissionless listings for any asset with a price oracle, transforming platforms like Hyperliquid into a 24/7 global financial infrastructure, enabling the trading of all assets from commodities to Pre-IPO equity.

Why Perps Outpaced Spot Trading

Image: Top 5 decentralized perpetual contract trading platforms by 24-hour trading volume on CoinGecko as of March 2, 2026

Capital Efficiency: Doing More with Less

The fundamental advantage of perpetual contracts lies in capital efficiency. In the spot market, buying $10,000 worth of Bitcoin requires $10,000 of capital, which is locked up for the holding period. In the perpetual market, a small fraction of the funds through leverage can provide the same exposure, freeing up liquidity for other positions or strategies.

Aside from speculation, perpetual contracts also enable market participants to:

• Hedge existing positions without selling the underlying asset (thus triggering a taxable event);
• Arbitrage spreads across exchanges;
• Express directional views without the friction of physical settlement; and
• Deploy capital across multiple opportunities simultaneously.

Every dollar in the perpetual market has a greater impact than a dollar in spot. For traders, funds, and institutions optimizing their capital returns, the scale is tipping towards perps.

Market Maturation: Following the Path of Traditional Finance

The explosive growth of crypto derivatives mirrors a pattern seen in every mature financial market. In traditional finance, the derivatives market often far exceeds the underlying spot market, sometimes reaching 10 to 50 times the size. For example, in the interest rate swap market, the notional value surpasses $400 trillion, while the global bond market size is around $130 trillion.

The crypto market is just playing catch-up. As the market matures and more experienced participants enter, the ratio of derivatives to spot volume continues to grow. Just the top ten exchanges generated $92.9 trillion in perpetual contract volume, far surpassing the sum of all spot trading volumes on crypto exchanges.

Hedging Resilience: Staying Strong in Downturns

Arguably the most compelling evidence of the value proposition of perpetual contracts emerged during the downturn in Q4 2025. While the spot market contracted and investor sentiment worsened, the trading volume on the top ten perpetual contract exchanges actually increased by 64.6% year over year.

Why is that? Because perpetual contracts allow traders to profit in both directions. When prices fall, short positions profit significantly, intensifying hedging activities. The market's ability to express bearish views keeps funds active, trading volumes high, even as spot buying interest dries up.

In a traditional pure spot market, a price decline usually means reduced activity. This trend can be seen in the CEX spot trading volumes, which dropped from $2.21 trillion in January 2025 to a low of $0.95 trillion in December.

However, in the perpetual market, any direction of volatility means opportunity. Data from 2025 demonstrates that this dynamic has fundamentally altered the structure of the crypto market.

Figure: CEX vs. DEX Spot and Perpetual Contract Trading Volume

The Great Migration: DEX vs. CEX

Figure: Top 10 Perp CEX and Perp DEX Trading Volume

Source: CoinGecko 2025 Cryptocurrency Industry Report

Despite centralized exchanges still dominating in absolute scale, the true story of 2025 is the rapid rise of decentralized perpetual contract trading platforms. Perp DEX volume surged by 346%, reaching a record-breaking $6.7 trillion for the year.

To put this leap into perspective: in just the peak month of October 2025, Perp DEX processed $1.18 trillion in volume, more than four times the volume in January 2025.

The Disruption of DEX

By 2025, Perp DEX had addressed the fundamental usability issues that had previously kept users on centralized platforms:

1. User Experience Parity: The notion of "clunky DEX operation" was put to rest in 2025. Platforms like Hyperliquid and Lighter provided interfaces nearly indistinguishable from Binance or Coinbase. Order book depth was sufficient, trades were near-instantaneous, and regular traders could hardly tell they were using a decentralized platform.

2. Competitive Fee Structures: Early DEX platforms charged a premium for decentralization. By 2025, competition and technological advancements had pushed Perp DEX fees to match or even fall below CEX levels. Platforms like Hyperliquid even began offering up to 90% taker rebates, on par with the most competitive CEX fee structures.

3. Scalability Performance: Early blockchain-based DEXs were unable to handle the volume required by serious derivatives trading platforms. The emergence of dedicated Layer 1 chains and optimized rollups has solved this issue. Taking Hyperliquid's custom L1 as an example, it can process thousands of transactions per second with confirmation times of less than one second — a performance that rivals centralized infrastructure.

Holdings Differentiation

According to CoinGecko's "2025 Crypto Industry Annual Report," CEX holdings decreased by 20.8% in 2025, while DEX holdings surged by 229.6%.

Holdings, the total value of open derivative contracts, represent committed funds and beliefs. This differentiation tells us that traders are not just "trying out" DEXs for quick trades; they are building significant long-term positions on-chain.

This shift represents a reallocation of funds from centralized to decentralized infrastructure. Once this migration begins, network effects will accelerate it. More liquidity attracts more traders, which, in turn, attracts more liquidity providers, further deepening liquidity.

The Rise of Hyperliquid and Lighter

The 2025 perpetual contract trading platform rankings revealed a significant shift in market structure. Two decentralized platforms forcefully entered the top ten, replacing established centralized players:

· @HyperliquidX: Ranked 7th globally, with an annual trading volume of $29 trillion;
· @Lighter_xyz: Ranked 10th globally, with an annual trading volume of $13 trillion.

In 2025, Hyperliquid's trading volume surpassed that of Coinbase International. This decentralized platform, established less than two years ago, outperformed a publicly listed institutionally supported exchange platform with billions of dollars in capital and years of operation.

In 2025, Coinbase International processed around $14 trillion. Hyperliquid, on the other hand, reached $29 trillion — double that of the former.

Infrastructure Wins

The key to Hyperliquid's success was not clever marketing or token incentives but infrastructure. The platform built its own Layer 1 blockchain (HyperCore) specifically optimized for perpetual contract trading.

This architectural decision has completely put an end to the "Slow DEX" narrative. By controlling the full tech stack from consensus mechanism to matching engine, Hyperliquid has achieved: sub-second transaction confirmation; zero gas fees for liquidity providers; 20,000+ orders per second throughput; 100% uptime throughout 2025.

In contrast, Ethereum-based DEXs have suffered from network congestion and volatile gas costs, and other L2 solutions have relied on external infrastructure. Hyperliquid's vertical integration has delivered a user experience equivalent to centralized exchanges while preserving complete decentralized security.

Lighter has followed a similar path, albeit with different technical implementations. The conclusion is clear: To compete with centralized exchanges, DEXs must control their own infrastructure fate.

Beyond Crypto: Hyperliquid's HIP-3 Revolution

By the end of 2025, Hyperliquid implemented HIP-3 (Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3), fundamentally changing its market structure.

Permissionless Listing

Prior to this, launching a new perpetual market required validator approval—a semi-centralized process. HIP-3 introduced a permissionless perpetual market deployment mechanism.

Any builder can now create a perpetual market for any asset with a reliable price feed. No token required, no permission needed, no listing fees.

The immediate impact was explosive. Within weeks, perpetual markets for assets that had never traded on-chain before appeared on the platform.

Bridging to Traditional Finance

By February 2026, the impact of HIP-3 had become increasingly clear. Platforms like Hyperliquid were no longer just "crypto derivatives trading platforms" but were evolving into global financial market infrastructure.

The perpetual markets on Hyperliquid now cover:

· Commodities: Gold and silver perpetual contracts tracking COMEX futures; crude oil and natural gas; agricultural products (wheat, corn, soybeans).

· Equity-related: Pre-IPO companies like SpaceX and OpenAI; synthetic exposure to major tech stocks; index perpetual contracts (S&P 500, Nasdaq 100).

· Alternative Assets: Prediction Markets (election results, economic indicators); Sports Betting Derivatives; Weather Derivatives.

This expansion implies that the Perp DEX is becoming the infrastructure for 24/7 global price discovery.

Market That Never Sleeps

Traditional financial markets close — the New York Stock Exchange closes at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, and the CME futures market halts trading on Sunday evenings. This causes friction, information gaps, and opportunity costs.

On the other hand, blockchain-based perpetual markets never close. While traditional markets are offline, on-chain markets continue to operate, incorporating new information in real-time.

Imagine this: a major news event breaks on a Sunday evening — geopolitical crisis, corporate bankruptcy, central bank unexpected move. Traditional markets can only price in this information on Monday morning, leading to potential price gaps and dislocations.

Perpetual contracts on platforms like Hyperliquid would immediately price in the information. As the liquidity in these markets deepens, they might start influencing the opening prices of traditional markets — the 24/7 on-chain prices are becoming the reference point that traditional markets catch up on Monday mornings.

Conclusion: The New Frontier of Perpetual Contracts

The data from 2025 tells a clear story: Perpetual contracts have become a dominant force in crypto trading, decentralized platforms are rapidly narrowing the gap with centralized counterparts.

The numbers speak for themselves: Top ten perpetual contract trading platforms with $92.9 trillion trading volume; DEX perpetual trading growing by 346%; DEX open interest surging by 229.6%; Leading DEXs have replaced major CEXs in the rankings.

As permissionless markets become a reality, blockchain infrastructure achieves parity with centralized systems in performance, blurring the lines between "crypto trading platforms" and the "global financial markets." These platforms are moving towards the "on-chain financial market" — where any asset with a price feed can be traded 24/7, fully self-custodial, and settlement-transparent.

The spot trading model — buying and settling assets physically — will continue to exist. But in price discovery, hedging, and capital-efficient speculation, perpetual contracts will take the lead.

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