Chainfeeds Introduction:
The future of DeFi does not lie in multi-chain expansion, but belongs to protocols that can transform industry narratives into user habits. Chinese version compiled and published by PANews.
Article Source:
https://www.panewslab.com/zh/articledetails/4bop5anc.html
Article Author:
Stacy Muur
Perspective:
Stacy Muur: In early 2024, DEX trading volume was strong in March and May, and began to slow down mid-year. However, the market underwent a dramatic change in the fourth quarter, with trading volume surging in November and December, a momentum that continued into January 2025, reaching a historical high of $380 billion that month. This was followed by a sharp pullback, with trading volume plummeting to $245 billion in February 2025, a 35% month-on-month decline, ending the previous three months of vertical rise. Behind the trading explosion, the DEX market landscape remains highly concentrated. Data shows that the top ten protocols account for 79.5% of daily trading volume, with the top five accounting for 59.1%. Uniswap and PancakeSwap have long dominated, collectively contributing nearly 40% of market share and becoming the first DEX platforms to accumulate over $1 trillion in trading volume. This is mainly due to their significant barriers in multi-chain ecosystem support, deep liquidity, and early advantages. Looking back at 2024-2025, the chain-level DEX market share showed extreme volatility. Solana was one of the biggest winners, with its market share rising from single digits in early 2024 to a peak of 45.8% in January 2025, driven by TRUMP and MELANIA meme coins. However, just two months later, its share was halved to 21.5%, though Solana still led the DEX activity ranking with an average share of 25.1%. Ethereum took the opposite path: starting with a 32% market share in early 2024, continuously sliding to 15.3% in January 2025, but quickly rebounding to 26.4% in March. This reflects Ethereum's strong resilience, able to attract users and capital back even after losing growth momentum. Base performed steadily, without major breakthroughs but maintaining a steady upward trend. Growing from 3% in March 2024 to 12.4% in December of the same year, and falling back to 7.4% in March 2025, with an average share of 6.6%. BNB Chain was notably stable, maintaining a market share of about 14.7% throughout the year, showing a solid retail base with low volatility. Between 2024-2025, the execution infrastructure for on-chain perpetual contract trading underwent a complete restructuring. Hyperliquid's dedicated chain quickly rose, with its market share soaring from 13.6% in early 2024 to 58.9% in March 2025, comprehensively replacing mainstream Layer1 and Layer2 platforms like Ethereum and Arbitrum to become the default execution layer for perpetual trading. Behind this transformation is an extreme pursuit of speed, reliability, and low latency. Designed for professional traders, Hyperliquid's integrated on-chain matching and high concurrency support significantly outperform traditional DEXs in product experience. Meanwhile, dYdX's market share plummeted from 13.2% to 2.7%, reflecting user loss and product iteration lag. Jupiter, with its native liquidity and spot trading on Solana, has also gained a foothold in the perpetual market, currently holding an 8.8% market share. Additionally, emerging protocols like SynFutures, Vertex Protocol, and Paradex briefly attracted attention but ultimately failed to challenge Hyperliquid's dominance. More importantly, the evolution of the execution layer has shifted from the logic of "multi-chain support" to "dedicated chain optimization". Traditional public chains like Ethereum and Arbitrum's perpetual trading market share has dropped from over 65% to 11.8%, while emerging chains like Hyperliquid, Solana, Base, and ZKsync are gradually forming new infrastructure standards. This transformation emphasizes a trend: performance-driven dedicated execution layers are defining the new future of on-chain finance.
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