Aster Token Soars as Perpetual DEX Mania Rages On

Nearly ten months after Hyperliquid conducted DeFi’s largest airdrop, users are scrambling to get a piece of the “next Hyperliquid,” and this week, traders are piling into Aster, a decentralized exchange (DEX) incubated by YZi Labs.

Aster, which originally launched as ApolloX with a token called APX in 2021, rebranded itself to Aster after a merger with Astherus in December 2024. All APX holders were able to convert their APX to ASTER upon the token generation event (TGE) yesterday.

Following the ASTER TGE, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the co-founder of Binance, the world’s largest centralized exchange, promoted the token launch on X, sending it soaring.
APX, which had just a $40 million market capitalization on Sept. 16, can now be converted to ASTER tokens, which are trading at a $1.9 billion market capitalization, representing a 4650% increase in just two days. The ASTER token opened at roughly $0.08 and reached as high as $0.79 today, an 875% increase.

Perpetuals Sector Explodes

Meanwhile, TVL on the pre-token DEX Lighter has surged to $485 million, a 38% increase from just two weeks ago. The platform is the second-largest perpetuals trading protocol in DeFi, with $112 billion in volume over the last month, only trailing Hyperliquid’s $335 billion.

Onchain perpetuals trading has grown significantly in 2025, with total volume reaching $750 billion in August, representing almost 10% more than the total volume traded across all protocols combined in 2023.

While the rise of Hyperliquid is the most obvious catalyst, the year has also lacked a sticky onchain “meta” to capture traders’ attention, such as ICOs in 2017, NFTs in 2021 and 2022, and memecoins in 2023 and 2024, which may have left risk-hungry degens settling for leverage trading.