Binance founder CZ is selling a brand new decentralized trade, Aster, as Lighter farming ramps up whereas customers flock to seek out the subsequent Hyperliquid.
Practically ten months after Hyperliquid performed DeFi’s largest airdrop, customers are scrambling to get a bit of the “subsequent Hyperliquid,” and this week, merchants are piling into Aster, a decentralized trade (DEX) incubated by YZi Labs.
Aster, which initially launched as ApolloX with a token referred to as APX in 2021, rebranded itself to Aster after a merger with Astherus in December 2024. All APX holders had been in a position to convert their APX to ASTER upon the token era occasion (TGE) yesterday.
Following the ASTER TGE, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the co-founder of Binance, the world’s largest centralized trade, promoted the token launch on X, sending it hovering.
APX, which had only a $40 million market capitalization on Sept. 16, can now be transformed to ASTER tokens, that are buying and selling at a $1.9 billion market capitalization, representing a 4650% improve in simply two days. The ASTER token opened at roughly $0.08 and reached as excessive as $0.79 at this time, an 875% improve.
Perpetuals Sector Explodes
In the meantime, TVL on the pre-token DEX Lighter has surged to $485 million, a 38% improve from simply two weeks in the past. The platform is the second-largest perpetuals buying and selling protocol in DeFi, with $112 billion in quantity over the past month, solely trailing Hyperliquid’s $335 billion.
Onchain perpetuals buying and selling has grown considerably in 2025, with complete quantity reaching $750 billion in August, representing virtually 10% greater than the entire quantity traded throughout all protocols mixed in 2023.
Whereas the rise of Hyperliquid is the obvious catalyst, the 12 months has additionally lacked a sticky onchain “meta” to seize merchants’ consideration, corresponding to ICOs in 2017, NFTs in 2021 and 2022, and memecoins in 2023 and 2024, which can have left risk-hungry degens settling for leverage buying and selling.
