Surge in Perpetual Swap Trading: A Shift Towards Decentralized Platforms in 2025

Perpetual Swap Trading Surges Amid Market Decline: Decentralized Exchanges Lead the Charge

In a remarkable turn of events, perpetual swap trading across the top 10 centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges skyrocketed to an astonishing $92.9 trillion in 2025. This represents a staggering 64.6% year-over-year increase, occurring not during a market rally but against a backdrop of broad market decline. Notably, decentralized perpetual platforms experienced an explosive growth of 346%, reaching $6.7 trillion in annual volume.

What Happened: Perp DEXs Explode

A recent report from CoinGecko highlights a significant structural shift in the crypto derivatives market, with traders increasingly favoring decentralized exchanges (DEXs) over their centralized counterparts. Among the top 10 perpetual platforms globally, two decentralized exchanges made a striking entrance: Hyperliquid, ranking No. 7 with $2.9 trillion in annual volume, and Lighter, securing the No. 10 spot with $1.3 trillion.

Hyperliquid’s performance is particularly noteworthy, as it more than doubled the trading volume of Coinbase International, which processed approximately $1.4 trillion in 2025. Launched less than two years ago, Hyperliquid developed its own Layer 1 blockchain, HyperCore, designed for sub-second trade finality and a throughput exceeding 20,000 orders per second.

The report also revealed a dramatic shift in open interest data. While open interest in centralized exchanges (CEXs) fell by 20.8% in 2025, decentralized exchanges saw a remarkable increase of 229.6%. Spot volumes on CEXs also plummeted, dropping from $2.21 trillion in January 2025 to just $950 billion by December.

In late 2025, Hyperliquid rolled out its HIP-3 upgrade, allowing for permissionless perpetual market deployment for any asset with a price feed—eliminating the need for tokens, approvals, or listing fees. This upgrade enabled the platform to host perpetual contracts on various commodities, including gold, silver, and crude oil, as well as synthetic equity exposure for pre-IPO companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, and index products tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.

Why It Matters: Market Restructuring

The data suggests that the crypto market is mirroring traditional finance, where derivatives volumes often exceed spot markets by factors of 10 to 50. For instance, the interest rate swaps market alone surpasses $400 trillion in notional value, dwarfing the roughly $130 trillion in global bond markets.

During the Q4 2025 market downturn, perpetual exchanges demonstrated remarkable resilience. Traders leveraged the ability to profit from both bullish and bearish positions, keeping capital engaged even as spot buying dwindled. This dynamic, as the report argues, has fundamentally transformed the structure of crypto markets, indicating a maturation of the industry.

As the crypto landscape continues to evolve, the rise of decentralized exchanges marks a pivotal moment, reshaping how traders engage with derivatives and signaling a potential shift in the broader financial ecosystem.

Alexey Bondarev is the Head of Content at Yellow.com, specializing in in-depth research and analytical reporting on the evolving crypto landscape.