From Trading Venues to Financial Platforms
Perpetual decentralized exchanges started out as niche products—places where crypto traders could access leveraged futures around the clock without handing over custody of their funds. Now they’re evolving into something bigger, and the transformation is happening faster than most people expected.
What makes these platforms different from traditional finance is their ability to bundle everything into one place: execution, clearing, settlement, custody, and increasingly, credit. Tasks that used to require multiple intermediaries and days of back-and-forth can now happen in seconds through smart contracts. According to fresh analysis from Delphi Digital, we’re watching the trading layer and the banking layer merge in real time—something that simply wasn’t technically feasible just a few years ago.
Two forces are driving this shift. First, demand for leverage hasn’t disappeared despite crypto’s wild price swings. Traders pushed more than twelve trillion dollars through perpetual futures contracts in 2025 alone—triple the volume from the year before. Second, platforms like Hyperliquid and Aster have started offering native lending. That means you can now borrow to finance your positions without moving assets off the exchange. In effect, these DEXs are doing what broker-dealers used to monopolize, while keeping the transparency and self-custody that drew people to DeFi in the first place.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Market share data backs up the hype. At the start of 2023, perpetual DEXs handled barely two percent of global perpetual futures volume. By the end of 2025, that figure hit nearly twelve percent—roughly one in every nine trades. On the spot side, decentralized exchanges now capture more than a fifth of global volume, up from just six percent in early 2021.
Revenue numbers are even more striking. Fee income flowing to on-chain derivatives platforms regularly tops one billion dollars a month now. When you factor in the cost savings from eliminating custody and clearing middlemen, these venues often offer tighter spreads than their centralized competitors.
Under the hood, total value locked across major perp DEXs crossed twenty billion dollars late last year, with open interest hovering around the same level. Liquidity depth and execution speed—historically the weak points for on-chain trading—keep getting better as Layer-2 rollups and parallel execution tech mature. For a growing number of professional trading desks, the user experience is now good enough to justify shifting at least some order flow on-chain, if only as insurance against centralized exchange blowups.
What This Means for Traditional Finance
It’s not about matching the scale of traditional banks—global over-the-counter derivatives still run into the hundreds of trillions. What matters is the trajectory. When exchanges can bundle trading, credit, and custody into a single on-chain layer, they start looking a lot like prime brokers. Push it further, and you’re talking about universal banks.
The big obstacles remain regulatory clarity, reliable fiat on-ramps, and unsecured lending at scale. But experiments are already happening: tokenized treasury bills as collateral, zero-fee order books subsidized by native tokens, real-world-asset vaults designed to satisfy institutional risk committees.
Industry watchers don’t think this ends with a winner-take-all fight between DEXs and banks. More likely, perpetual DEXs become wholesale infrastructure providers—transparent, composable rails that traditional institutions can white-label or integrate. For now, what matters is momentum. And judging by the numbers, that momentum is squarely with code-based finance.
