Give some warnings to the people at Fomo Perp Dex: share some "incongruous" remarks.

Author: X@tmel0211

Seeing too many people Fomo into Perp Dex, after sobering up, I want to share some thoughts that feel somewhat “incongruous” with the market's prosperity. The following only represents my personal understanding:

1. The rise of the Perp Dex this time is driven by the successful model of @HyperliquidX, which accounted for 70% of the total trading volume of over one trillion in the first half of 2025. With the dual driving force of transaction fees and buybacks, it has become a phenomenon-level CEX Killer product.

So everyone wants to imitate Hyperliquid, CEXs are imitating out of panic, other Perp Dex protocols are imitating out of envy, and KOLs are FOMOing because they are afraid of missing the next $HYPE.

2. New projects like @Aster_DEX and @SunPerp_DEX represent CEX's learning from Hyperliquid's new product thinking, reconstructing the “exchange” operational flywheel. In other words, it involves applying Hyperliquid's product thinking to CEX exchanges while adopting the operational model of DEX.

The operational logic is very simple: in the early stage, attract LPs and large investors to inject capital; in the mid-stage, create FOMO through point brushing and airdrops; and in the later stage, lock in traffic with low fees and business rebate logic. Throughout the process, the technical narrative serves more as a packaging role, while the entire “operational flywheel” is the real skill.

3. HyperLiquid first ran the business logic, mastering liquidity and pricing power, which is why the CLOB mechanism and high-performance L1 stories are now credible.

@Lighter_xyz, Aster, and Sunperp, these trendy newcomers are similar; they first create hype using “black box technology,” attract attention with impressive data, and then rely on points/airdrops to lock in traffic.

For example, Lighter's ZK-SNARK proof currently verifies each transaction in a closed-source black box, who knows the truth; Aster's ZK optimization + multi-chain + MEV-resistant hidden orders are still in the Roadmap stage, only driven by @cz_binance's calls, I won't comment on Sunperp, everyone understands.

4. In my previous article, I criticized the reasons why established Perp DEXs struggle to succeed, actually intending to guide them and point the way. This is because most of them are still trapped in a technical dilemma where transparency, compliance, and business cannot be balanced. They may just need to adopt a more aggressive trading approach to rejuvenate their platforms.

Imagine that @dYdX has been stuck in compliance issues with governance tokens not providing dividends after transitioning from layer 1 to layer 2 and then to an independent chain for so long, while @GMX_IO is blocked from expanding due to high slippage in AMM.

It can be considered that the rationalist Builders with technology have all been constrained, while the newcomers who talk about concepts and manipulate operational data have become the new hope. In other words, if this wave of new forces in Perp Dex completely gains the upper hand, it will be tantamount to declaring a total defeat for the DeFi version of Perp Dex.

5. The success of Hyerliquid lies in its ability to disrupt the past DeFi model of governance token mining by utilizing trading mining + buyback models. To be honest, it's good that CEX is willing to invest real money to create new focal products, bringing more growth opportunities to the market, and at least retail investors can benefit from the trends.

But the problem is that this set of positive growth flywheel of “Trading Volume - Fees - Buyback - Token Appreciation” has only been successfully run by Hyperliquid. How many other new anti-arbitrage projects can be fully validated by the market? If they cannot distinguish themselves from the previous wave that created CEX and then Rug pulled, can retail investors in the current market withstand the large-scale harvesting?