Is Arkham also entering the Perp DEX? On November 6, $ARKM surged past $2.1, rising over 20% in 24 hours, influenced by news of 'Arkham's upcoming derivatives trading platform.' Arkham itself does not derive from Defi; the project's initial positioning was as an AI on-chain analysis tool. Arkham uses AI to collect, categorize, and display a large amount of on-chain data through the Arkham panel, providing data that was previously only accessible to blockchain analysts and enthusiasts, thus increasing the transparency of on-chain data. It is important to note that Arkham's newly announced perpetuals exchange and Arkham Intel exchange, although both exchanges, are completely different.

AI seems to be a universal tool, applicable everywhere. While Arkham's entry into the DeFi track based on an AI data platform certainly has its natural advantages, why is it transforming into Perp?

Why is everyone getting into Perp?

On one hand, market liquidity has already shifted from centralized exchanges like CEX to on-chain. Retail investors holding altcoins that have already listed are still trapped, while on-chain has already begun a real altcoin season. Altcoins in exchanges are still moving in the 'opposite direction of a hundredfold,' even though Bitcoin has reached a new high of $75,000, these altcoins are still hitting caps at previous highs. In contrast, Solana has seen a surge of meme coins like NEIRO, MOODENG, GOAT, etc., and even Binance has had to continuously list these on-chain native meme coins. Where there is a wealth creation effect, there is liquidity.

On the other hand, CEX not only lists coins slowly and imposes trading restrictions in different regions, but most importantly, it has listed a series of chips with severely unfair structures for 'VC coins.' Recently, the CEO of cryptocurrency investment consulting firm Moonrock Capital spoke on Twitter, claiming: 'Binance requires a potential project to provide 15% of its total token supply to ensure its listing on centralized exchanges, which accounts for 15% of the total token supply, valued at approximately $50 million to $100 million.' This prompted major KOLs to discuss listing fees on Twitter.

Regardless of how listing fees are, in the eyes of the majority of retail investors, a vicious cycle has formed among 'VC-project parties-CEX,' where they pool resources, list coins, and retail investors are trapped. Therefore, compared to the stagnant waters of secondary listing tokens, users are forced to embrace on-chain, where at least the ecological niche for retail investors on-chain is relatively fair. As the old saying goes: 'Fairness, fairness, still xxx fairness.' To some extent, CEX's 'self-inflicted' misfortune has given these on-chain players room to grow.

What are the main players in the market?

The current Perp DEX track seems to be as crowded as Ethereum L2. Besides well-known leading projects like dydx, Hyperliquid, and Jupiter, there are also about a dozen Perp DEXs barely maintaining lifelines. Due to the lack of liquidity, they have now basically degenerated into speculative arbitrage tools. I will analyze them one by one in the order of market share.

Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid stands out among many Perp DEXs, being the undisputed market leader from various data dimensions. It currently occupies about 25% of the entire Perp DEX market.

Hyperliquid not only has a solid foundation and has improved trading performance, but it also introduced the HyperBFT algorithm for optimization in May of this year, increasing trading speed to the level of 10-20 WTPS. At the same time, Hyperliquid has chosen to build a low-latency, high-throughput Perp DEX application chain.

Moreover, Hyperliquid's operation is also very clever. When Hyperliquid launched its spot feature, it airdropped the meme coin PURR to early users of the platform. While many CEXs had yet to react to on-chain meme coins, Hyperliquid had already 'taken the lead' in launching the corresponding spot.

However, Hyperliquid has not issued tokens, so it has little voice in the Chinese community. Most of its recognition comes from 'value discovery' in the English-speaking community.

Jupiter

As the leading DEX aggregator on Solana, Jupiter naturally inherits the tremendous traffic on Solana. Jupiter will find the best price routes among all major DEXs and AMMs on Solana, minimizing slippage and transaction costs to improve trading efficiency for users. Although Jupiter offers various functions such as spot trading, DCA, and limit order trading, the most popular remains Perp trading. Among them, the perpetual contract trading supports half of Jupiter's fee income.

Jupiter's native token $JUP is also very popular and loved by the community. JUP holders can stake for voting dividends, and JUP also has a certain price increase that allows for both holding and selling. With a solid foundation and a good community reputation, Jupiter occupies about 10% of the market share.

SynFutures V3

SynFutures was initially deployed on Ethereum's Layer2 Blast, but due to the community's negative feedback and large-scale ecological loss caused by the overly inflated 'Pinduoduo' points, SynFutures 'moved' to the Base chain in July of this year. Currently, SynFutures has become the largest on-chain derivatives trading platform on Base. As Bitcoin breaks through $80,000, the market gradually recovers. SynFutures V3's trading volume and TVL have also begun to hit new highs.

On November 6, SynFutures launched the industry's first issuance platform focused on the derivatives market, Perp Launchpad, on Base. Project parties only need to provide initial liquidity using their project tokens to launch corresponding perpetual contract markets. At the same time, SynFutures has established a $1 million Perp Launchpad incentive plan to provide prize support for emerging projects, including trading competitions, market promotion, and community activities.

dydx

As a project that has been frequently discussed, dydx was regarded by many KOLs as a hundredfold coin at the beginning of the bull market. However, both its fundamental performance and the price of the DYDX token have been disappointing. Consequently, there are many early players in the community turning to FUD dydx, which can be described as 'deep love, sharp criticism.' dydx's market share barely maintains around 6-7%, standing at the end of the mainstream tier.

As the first project to emerge in the Perp DEX arena, dydx's TVL peaked at nearly $1.2 billion in 2022. However, after the market entered a prolonged bear phase, it fell into stagnation, and even during the mid-term of the 2024 mini-bull market, it did not experience a revival. Even in the recent hot on-chain market, its TVL continues to decline. Only when it announced a pump did the DYDX token rise by 20%, barely benefiting from this meme dividend. On October 10, dydx founder Antonio Juliano announced his return and reassumed the role of CEO of dydx, followed by layoffs and restructuring. The market also anticipates that the return and reform by the founder can lead dydx out of its current predicament.

Arkham

Arkham perpetuals exchange will offer users 0 transaction fees for limit spot and contract trading (i.e., Maker), while for market trading (i.e., Taker) users, the fee discount will be determined based on their holdings of $ARKM and trading volume. If users choose to pay fees using ARKM, they will also receive a 25% fee discount. Users can earn points by trading on Arkham perpetuals exchange. VIP users who open accounts can increase their total points by 10%, and the points on Arkham Intel exchange remain valid.

However, Arkham's operation of perp is no different from other perp startups. It attracts the first batch of users through points or fee discount models, but these users only treat the perp DEX as a mine and not as real effective traffic. Let's take a look at this year's March shining example of perp, Aevo.

After Aevo announced its airdrop details in March, its TVL and trading volume reached their peaks. Subsequently, the TVL continuously declined, and the trading volume began to plummet on a weekly basis, with actual trading volume losing 80% a month later. From a data perspective, most participants in trading on Aevo are on-chain 'yield farmers,' and there are pitifully few real users. After losing the allure of token airdrops, the inflated traffic data was ruthlessly pierced by the market. Ironically, its token price dropped by nearly 90% after the airdrop.

The point system and fee reductions can indeed attract a large number of users in the early stages of the platform, but how to retain 'real users' relying on 'real products' and 'real business' after this kind of 'mining-like' activity ends, avoiding the old path of Aevo's data cliff, is the challenge Arkham perp faces next.

What is the current state of the perp market?

Although Perp DEXs are also innovating their products, not only with spot, lending, betting, and per-launch, but also from a liquidity design standpoint with order books and auctions, they are not sailing smoothly. Even the leading Hyperliquid struggles to compete with Binance. According to Dune data, Hyperliquid's trading volume accounts for only 1/9 of Binance's spot trading volume.

In today's decentralized perpetual contract track, almost every L1 and L2 supports its own Perp DEX in order to complete the 'DeFi family bucket.'

However, the decentralization of public chains leads to a fragmentation of liquidity. Under the same roof, how can there be perfect eggs? Public chains are like this, and Perp is the same. Fragmented liquidity is difficult to generate scale efficiency. If inter-chain liquidity can be realized, then Perp can enjoy sufficient liquidity like CEX. Only then will the entire Perp DEX market welcome a real leader. The pattern of a multi-chain universe is like chains shackling the ceiling of Perp's development.

On the other hand, the audience of Perp DEX is mostly risk-seeking individuals. The advantage of Perp over CEX lies in the speed of listing new coins, the richness of coin types, and the flexibility of products, which naturally attracts high-risk speculative groups. Therefore, on the audience level, it is inherently smaller than the target group of CEX. Moreover, centralized exchanges like OKX, Bybit, and Bitget are also continuously getting involved in the segmented market before trading, competing for market share with perp DEX. On the path to securing the CEX seat and fighting for market voice, Perp DEX has a long way to go.