Perpetual swap trading across the top 10 centralized and decentralized crypto exchanges reached $92.9 trillion in 2025 — a 64.6% year-over-year increase that occurred not during a rally but against a broad market decline — while decentralized perpetual platforms surged 346% to $6.7 trillion in annual volume.
What Happened: Perp DEXs Explode
According to a CoinGecko research report published this week, the crypto derivatives market has undergone a structural shift away from centralized platforms and toward decentralized alternatives. Two decentralized exchanges broke into the top 10 perpetual platforms globally: Hyperliquid ranked No. 7 with $2.9 trillion in annual volume, and Lighter ranked No. 10 with $1.3 trillion.
Hyperliquid more than doubled the volume of Coinbase International, which processed roughly $1.4 trillion in 2025.
The platform, launched less than two years earlier, built its own Layer 1 blockchain — called HyperCore — to handle sub-second trade finality and throughput exceeding 20,000 orders per second.
Open interest data reflected the same directional shift.
CEX open interest fell 20.8% in 2025, while DEX open interest rose 229.6%, according to the report.
CEX spot volumes also dropped sharply, from $2.21 trillion in Jan. 2025 to $950 billion by Dec. 2025.
In late 2025, Hyperliquid implemented its HIP-3 upgrade, enabling permissionless perpetual market deployment for any asset with a price feed — no token, approval or listing fee required. The platform now hosts perpetual contracts on commodities including gold, silver and crude oil, as well as synthetic equity exposure for pre-IPO companies such as SpaceX and OpenAI, and index products tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.
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Why It Matters: Market Restructuring
The data suggests the crypto market is following the trajectory of traditional finance, where derivatives volumes routinely exceed spot markets by factors of 10 to 50.
The interest rate swaps market alone exceeds $400 trillion in notional value, compared with roughly $130 trillion in global bond markets.
During the Q4 2025 market downturn, perpetual exchanges proved resilient because traders could profit in both directions through short positions and hedging. The ability to express bearish views kept capital engaged even as spot buying evaporated. That dynamic, the report argued, has fundamentally altered the structure of crypto markets.
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