What is a perp DEX?

A perp DEX sells the same core product as a centralized derivatives exchange: perpetual futures with leverage. The difference is custody. Your funds stay yours until you deposit margin into a smart contract or a chain-level system, and positions, liquidations and funding payments are recorded on-chain where anyone can check them.

Designs differ. Order book venues such as Hyperliquid and Lighter match bids and asks much like a centralized exchange, on a purpose-built chain or rollup that keeps latency low. Jupiter Perpetuals works differently: traders trade against a shared liquidity pool that takes the other side and earns fees. Aster offers an order book too, next to a simpler one-click mode built around very high leverage.

You swap one set of risks for another. No company holds your coins, but smart contracts, oracles and bridges can fail, and liquidity gets thin outside the biggest markets. Funding intervals and fee models differ as well, so the same position can cost more on one venue than on another.

Put invented numbers on it. SOL funding is 12 percent APR on one venue and 3 percent on another. A trader holding a SOL long pays four times as much on the first. On a $10,000 long held for 30 days, that is roughly $99 against $25.

Also called: perpetual DEX, decentralized perpetuals exchange, on-chain perps.

Perps risk is the cross-venue view. It sets the BTC, ETH and SOL funding rate on each of Hyperliquid, Lighter and Aster next to venue-wide 24h volume, and total open interest for the two venues that publish it, Hyperliquid and Lighter. Jupiter Perpetuals adds 24h volume only. A venue without comparable data is marked limited or unavailable instead of estimated. The Funding rates widget goes deeper on Hyperliquid, and Perps positions watches a Hyperliquid account. Robinhood perps reads Lighter's separate exchange on Robinhood Chain, stock and pre-IPO perps included, and sets its funding against Hyperliquid and Binance. The HIP-3 view in Hyperliquid markets lists the perps builders deploy on Hyperliquid's order book, stocks and commodities among them.

• Perps risk
• Robinhood perps
• Hyperliquid markets
• Funding rates
• Perps positions

• Perpetual futures
• Hyperliquid
• Funding rate
• Open interest
• HIP-3