Crypto's Perpetual Wars Heat Up: How Aster and Lighter Challenge Hyperliquid's Dominance

Source: Blockworks Original Title: Fixing crypto’s broken investor relations Original Link: https://blockworks.co/news/fixing-investor-relations

Macro Reasserts Its Influence

The Fed delivered the expected 25 basis point cut but signaled a much tighter policy path ahead, projecting only one cut for all of next year. This guidance was enough to knock BTC off its early strength and reinforce the idea that liquidity is not opening as quickly as many had hoped.

Markets saw a clear split yesterday between BTC and the major benchmarks. BTC closed at -0.73% while gold, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq finished at 0.57%, 0.53%, and 0.22%, respectively. Officials pointed to a cooling labor market, inflation still above target, and firm growth expectations. The message was clear: liquidity is not opening up as quickly as anticipated.

Across crypto sectors, performance was mixed. L2s and Memes posted gains of 1.70% and 1.27% respectively, while AI and DePIN lagged at -3% and -4%. BTC is circling $90,000, and the market feels stuck in neutral.

The Perpetual Futures Wars Intensify

Is HYPE losing momentum? The token has struggled to keep pace with the broader recovery, down -20% in the last seven days while BTC is down only -3%. The clearest answer is increased competition.

The performance peak lined up almost perfectly with the launch of Aster, which quickly captured market share and attention away from Hyperliquid. Since mid-September, Hyperliquid’s share of perpetual volume has fallen from 49% to 19% today. The majority of that lost share has gone to Aster and Lighter, with Lighter even slightly edging out Hyperliquid in weekly volume since mid-October.

However, volume alone does not tell the full story. When comparing weekly volume relative to open interest, both Lighter and Aster post much higher ratios than Hyperliquid. High ratios suggest faster turnover of outstanding positions and often signal activity driven by farming incentives. Lighter has its token launch approaching, which will give the first real read on how much of its activity is sustainable versus farm-and-flee.

Lighter is winning the fee battle with zero maker/taker fees, and the rise of perpetual aggregators could push more flow toward low-fee venues. Yet depth and market selection matter just as much, and Hyperliquid still leads on both—especially after the launch of equity perpetual markets that have seen strong early traction.

Recent headwinds such as team unlocks and concerns around auto deleveraging design have weighed on short-term sentiment. Even so, the core fundamentals remain powerful. Hyperliquid consistently generates between $10 million-$20 million in weekly revenue used for token buybacks. Very few protocols have that level of real economic engine behind them.

The real battle for perpetual dominance is only just getting started, and the next few months will reveal who is building a durable edge and who is simply riding the incentive wave.

Bridging the Investor Relations Gap

Crypto has matured fast. What used to be a market of purely speculative infrastructure plays has evolved into diversified, revenue-generating streams. Monthly protocol revenue (excluding stablecoins) averaged $175 million in 2025, a 133% increase year-over-year from $75 million in 2024.

The ability to coordinate globally on a decentralized network has led to unprecedented growth. Hyperliquid became the fastest team ever to reach $1 billion ARR, Tether raised at a $500 billion valuation, and Axiom hit $63 million in monthly revenue less than six months after launch. Industry monthly fundraising ranges from $500 million to $2 billion.

However, despite this growth, the industry has become harder to navigate than ever, especially for traditional finance investors looking to diversify into the asset class. While these assets have largely become ownership-based, functioning like cash-generating businesses, their unique crypto characteristics make due diligence extremely difficult.

Take Pendle Finance, a fixed/variable rate swap yield optimizing platform, as an example. The traditional interest-rate derivative industry trades $7.9 trillion per day. Yet understanding how this extends to crypto involves dense nuances:

• USDe Dominance (yields and rollover rates)
• Pricing power and Vote-Escrow tokenomics
• Protocol integrations and chain-specific dependencies
• Points incentive structures

This complexity extends to almost every product in today’s rapidly changing environment. How do you explain the advantages of a CLOB versus GLP model? How do you articulate the tradeoffs between modular versus monolithic lending? How sticky are different user acquisition models? Could this be why many protocols trade at steep discounts relative to traditional finance equivalents?

For professional allocators, the workflow is fundamentally broken. Critical information is constrained behind multiple dashboards, GitHub pages, and private communication channels. This fragmentation creates three distinct barriers to entry:

• Fragmentation: There is no canonical source for diligence. Data, documentation, governance and research are scattered across disparate platforms.
• Data Reliability: Public aggregators are frequently inconsistent or mislabeled. Without standardized definitions, a single bad input can compromise an entire investment thesis.
• The Translation Layer: Most materials are written for crypto natives. They lack translation into the metrics that investment committees require: revenue, retention, unit economics and cash flows.

To bridge this gap, a new investor relations platform is launching in partnership with the Solana Foundation. Designed to professionalize the connection between issuers and capital, the platform replaces the current fragmented workflow with a standardized environment. It focuses on replacing open aggregators with high-fidelity onchain metrics, converting raw governance activity into investment committee-ready research, and centralizing roadmap updates for direct communication between teams and allocators.

The mandate is a broader platform allowing crypto-native projects to effectively communicate with capital allocators and investors, starting with Solana given its intersection of high user activity and cash-flow generating applications.