Perp DEX Wars: institutional scorecard and the case for Paradex
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A1 Research report scoring eight perp DEXs on eight dimensions using 328 orderbook snapshots. Argues institutional capital will avoid fully transparent chains; Paradex scores 57/80, second to Hyperliquid, despite 0.99% market share.
Key claims
Perp DEX market did $7.9T in 2025
Oct 10 saw $19.1B liquidated in 24 hours
Paradex scores 57/80, behind only Hyperliquid
The perp DEX market did $7.9 trillion in 2025. Most of the conversation is still about volume rankings. That is the wrong conversation.
The real question is what happens when institutional capital shows up and discovers that every position, every liquidation level, every entry point is broadcast to the entire chain. Because that capital will not stay on transparent infrastructure. It never has. Dark pools handle over 50% of U.S. equity volume for exactly this reason.
October 10 made this concrete. $19.1 billion liquidated in 24 hours. Platforms with visible liquidation levels saw cascading forced closures consistent with predatory targeting. Platforms with architectural privacy did not. One architecture lost nearly half its open interest in the weeks after. The other held.
@Paradex is the only production venue that solved this from the ground up: encrypted state diffs on Ethereum L1, RPC-masked data on L2, off-chain CLOB execution, zero fees, and 28-61% tighter spreads for retail via order flow segmentation. It scores 57/80 in our framework, second only to Hyperliquid, and overtakes it entirely under a privacy-forward weighting.
The gap between Paradex's architectural quality and its current 0.99% market share is either the biggest mispricing in DeFi infrastructure or a thesis that never converts. TGE will be the definitive answer. But the OI-to-Volume ratio (0.014, tied second in the cohort, 2x the median) suggests the capital that is there is genuinely sticky.
We scored eight platforms across eight dimensions. 328 orderbook snapshots. Full liquidation analysis. Complete regulatory exposure mapping. This is the most comprehensive perp DEX comparison we have published.
The full report is below. It is not short. It is worth your time. ↓
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