The market is gloomy, but a very few projects are doing well, and Aster is one of them.
According to CoinGecko data on November 19, $ASTER has risen more than 7.7% in the past 24 hours, 18.4% in 7 days, and 32.1% in 14 days.
As one of the most successful TGE projects this year, after witnessing Aster TGE's remarkable performance with a weekly increase of over 2800%, the market has become more focused on Aster's future trajectory.
After all, having witnessed so many instances where TGE is the peak, only those who can maintain a continuous user base, trading activity, and revenue after TGE can be considered to have truly withstood the test of the market and the community.
Meanwhile, 2025 is a year of explosive growth for Perp DEX. With competition from other products in the same field such as Hyperliquid, Lighter, and EdgeX, Aster's battle to break through will become even more interesting.
So, what is Aster's core competitive strategy?
From launching Rocket Launch to provide users with an early entry point to high-quality assets, to launching the privacy-focused Layer 1, and then empowering the ASTER token in the crypto through a series of designs such as staking/buyback/burn/fee discounts… On November 10, 2025, Aster founder Leonard gave a clear answer through an AMA session directly addressing the community:
The market doesn't need another repetitive and boring Perp DEX; what it needs is true trading freedom, which integrates a range of requirements including security, trust, privacy, efficiency, cost, liquidity, and the discovery and capture of profit opportunities.
Aster is rebuilding its on-chain transaction ecosystem to achieve true stability and long-term success in the field of on-chain finance.
What did the founders say in an AMA aimed at clarifying Aster's future? Summarizing this one-hour AMA, you can easily grasp the following key points:
Aster is building a privacy-focused Layer 1: the team is working hard to complete internal testing and have the testnet technically ready by early 2026.
Continuously empowering the ASTER token in the crypto: Previously, Aster has launched specific use cases such as fee discounts, airdrops, and VIP levels for ASTER in the crypto, and has continuously empowered the value of the token through buyback and burn programs. In the future, with the launch of Layer 1, the $ASTER token will unlock more utility in more scenarios such as verification, staking, and governance.
Expand trading instruments: In addition to continuously expanding support for cryptocurrencies, support will be extended to assets such as gold, stocks, and commodities.
Optimize liquidity incentives: Continuously attract and reward market makers, incentivizing professional large-cap cryptocurrency market makers while also supporting those market makers who focus on providing liquidity to the long tail market.
Degen's strategic exploration: Launching and continuously operating Rocket Launch to empower users with early value capture capabilities.
Building a global cooperation network: Improving the trading ecosystem and bringing a richer experience.
Each line may seem independent, but they will work together to create a truly attractive trading environment for all participants in the trading ecosystem, including traders, institutions, holders, and market makers.
Following TGE, Aster reached new heights. TGE's enormous success was like a tsunami of traffic, bringing Aster a surge of users, trading volume, and community discussion.
With TGE successfully concluded, Aster, as a trading platform, has its own secrets to effectively retaining users in the future.
In Aster founder Leonard's plan, this is a dual-track path of horizontally expanding revenue and vertically deepening the user experience.
To retain users, the first step is to ensure a comfortable trading experience, which involves a series of optimizations. Aster is specifically built for traders, aiming to create a trading ecosystem that combines the smoothness of a CEX with the trustworthiness of a DEX. For traders, especially professional traders or institutional users, Aster offers a number of advantages:
On the one hand, under the decentralized architecture, Aster can list tokens faster and expand trading instruments more flexibly: Aster maintains permissionless openness and, in addition to supporting cryptocurrencies, also supports trading in assets such as US stocks and gold. In the future, it will expand to include more US stocks and commodities, providing a wide range of trading instruments for different traders on the blockchain.
On the other hand, Aster continues to advance its refined liquidity management. The market maker program aims to incentivize LPs to fill the gaps in market depth. While significantly optimizing the depth of mainstream cryptocurrencies, Aster will focus on long-tail assets in the future and plans to provide higher rebate rewards to market makers of smaller cryptocurrencies in order to improve depth and transaction quality, so that users can enjoy a smooth and low slippage experience regardless of which asset they are trading.
Privacy features are a major differentiating advantage of Aster compared to other Perp DEX platforms. Many users, especially institutional traders, do not want all their strategies and positions to be publicly disclosed on-chain. Aster's Hidden Orders and hidden order system can well meet this need, helping to attract more institutional funds to the market.
Furthermore, features such as 1001x leverage and fee advantages will further create significant cost differences for large institutions or high-leverage traders.
Beyond the trading experience, traders care even more about "gains," which aligns with Aster's core philosophy: Trade & Earn.
Stable returns are a key feature of Aster, which aims to provide users, especially institutional users, with more efficient capital utilization through this module. By combining lending, perpetual, and yield pool mechanisms, Aster aims to improve the rate of return on capital while maintaining controllable risk. In the future, Aster will also expand to more DeFi partners, bringing more yield scenarios.
USDF is the core of Aster's stable yield module. In the Aster trading system, USDF plays a triple role as trading collateral, liquidity asset, and passive income source. As a Delta-neutral yield stablecoin, USDF mainly generates yield by investing the underlying assets in low-risk DeFi protocols.
Following TGE, Aster has launched a variety of incentive initiatives for users. On the one hand, it continues to carry out Stage 3 and Stage 4 activities, and on the other hand, it launched the Double Harvest trading competition with a total prize pool of $10 million to attract users and promote the growth of the platform ecosystem by rewarding real trades.
Following TGE, another notable development for Aster is the launch of Rocket Launch. As the core vehicle for promoting Aster's value of "providing liquidity support," Rocket Launch provides a launch platform for high-potential projects that combines trading depth and long-term value. Projects can set up prize pools through the platform to reach a wider range of users, while users also have an entry point to embrace Degen and capture early opportunities. Since its launch, five projects have been launched, with a cumulative reward scale of over $3 million.
To date, Aster's growth logic has proven its effectiveness through concrete data performance:
According to official Aster data, Aster has over 4.6 million users; while according to Dune data, Aster's 24-hour open interest is $2.329 billion, weekly trading volume exceeds $25.6 billion, and Perp DEX market share exceeds 20%.
Although many metrics declined due to the market downturn, they still strongly demonstrate that Aster has firmly established itself in the Perp DEX market and has become a top-tier player in the sector.
While adhering to the dual-track approach of expanding revenue horizontally and deepening user experience vertically, the Aster trading ecosystem has even more room for growth as the Layer 1 strategy continues to advance.
Aster Layer 1: From Perp DEX to a Narrative Upgrade in Trading Infrastructure. In Leonard's AMA, the most attention-grabbing topic was Aster Layer 1.
Building Layer 1 is essentially building infrastructure. Aster Layer 1 aims to create a chain specifically reconstructed for transactions.
Why build a new chain? The core issue returns to Aster's original vision: to create a truly decentralized trading environment on-chain that still offers a CEX-like experience.
On the one hand, Aster believes that the trading ecosystem must be built on a decentralized foundation, because the verifiability and self-custody capabilities brought by blockchain can build a strong foundation of trust for the entire ecosystem.
On the other hand, for the trading ecosystem, the core of trading lies in order book matching. Aster needs an infrastructure that can provide near-centralized matching performance. However, most existing public chain solutions run trading matching in contracts or off-chain systems, treating the blockchain merely as a place to record data, which has many limitations.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of matching performance alone, Aster founder Leonard believes that no chain can currently beat centralized matching engines and databases. Therefore, while pursuing an experience comparable to CEXs, Aster Layer 1 must further find the key to differentiate itself, and privacy is Aster's answer.
In many cases, traders do not want their trading strategies to be completely transparently exposed on-chain, as this can cause them a lot of additional trouble, making strategy privacy increasingly important. The targeted attacks on Hyperliquid by renowned trader James Wynn aptly illustrate this point, and the rising popularity of Zcash further validates this market demand. Providing on-chain privacy options is both a current market gap and crucial for enabling more users and more strategies to run on-chain.
Based on all of the above, Aster Layer 1 has already begun to take shape:
Designed specifically for transactions: Aster Layer 1 aims to embed order book logic directly into the blockchain kernel, writing the entire transaction matching process into the consensus and execution layer, including order placement, matching, order cancellation, and cancellation. This ensures that the resource scheduling and performance optimization of the entire Aster Layer 1 chain revolves primarily around transactions, delivering a trading experience comparable to CEXs.
Deepening of privacy and security mechanisms: Privacy has always been Aster's core differentiating advantage. The design of Aster Layer 1 continues the privacy features, protecting trading strategies and user privacy.
Verifiable and self-custodied: Breaking the black box dilemma of centralized trading, trading participants can formulate trading rules and verify transactions.
The improved infrastructure brought about by Aster Layer 1 will effectively connect various modules of the ecosystem, bringing a series of chain reactions to the Aster trading ecosystem:
On the one hand, it's about optimizing the underlying trading experience;
On the other hand, achieving true "verifiability + self-custody + privacy" will open the door to institutional adoption and help Aster evolve its "trading infrastructure." Whether it's DeFi projects or traditional financial institutions such as brokerages, exchanges, banks, and payment companies, they can directly build on Aster and replicate Aster's successful model of "combining CEX-level smoothness with a DEX-trusted environment."
Aster provides a matching engine, liquidity, and risk control, while partner projects offer branding, product development, and localized operations.
In the future, Aster will start in Asia and further expand into the English-speaking market, continuously expanding its global partner network to achieve rapid expansion of the Aster trading ecosystem.
Meanwhile, with the launch of Layer 1 and the availability of staking functionality, the value cycle of the Aster trading ecosystem will be further closed through the ASTER token in the crypto.
All value is embodied in ASTER within the crypto ecosystem. ASTER continuously introduces specific application scenarios for ASTER within the crypto, empowering token holders. Currently available are:
Governance: Token holders can vote on protocol development, including which liquidity sources to integrate, fee structure, fund management, etc.
Fee Discount: Enjoy discounts when paying transaction fees using ASTER in the crypto;
VIP Tiers: A multi-tiered VIP system is established based on factors such as trading volume and ASTER holdings in the crypto. Higher-tier users can unlock deeper fee discounts, priority access to liquidity, higher leverage limits, and other benefits.
Token Airdrop: Holding or staking ASTER crypto will increase your multiplier in Aster Spectra, thus giving you priority access to future airdrops;
Activity participation: For example, you can only participate in Rocket Launch if you hold a certain amount of ASTER crypto.
In addition, Aster is also in talks with several lending protocols to further expand the use cases for ASTER tokens in the crypto.
In addition, Aster has introduced a buyback and burn mechanism to further maintain the value of the token:
Previously, Aster announced that 70%-80% of the transaction fees generated during S3 would be used to buy back ASTER crypto. It also stated that of all buyback funds from S2 and S3, 50% would be burned and 50% would be returned to locked airdrop addresses to reduce token supply and enhance its long-term value.
All operations are currently being carried out in an orderly and transparent manner, enhancing community trust.
These measures have significantly reduced the speculative nature of ASTER in the crypto, further transforming holders into long-term ecosystem co-builders. At the same time, a virtuous cycle of "more active trading → higher platform returns → higher buybacks and burns → further empowerment of holders" has been formed, creating a more sustainable positive flywheel.
With the official launch of Layer 1, $ASTER's value will be more closely tied to the entire Aster trading ecosystem:
On one hand, validator nodes and staking functionality are expected to launch alongside the Aster Layer 1 mainnet. Due to Layer 1's near-zero gas design, validator node incentives will be driven by two sources of funding: one is the ecosystem incentive allocation at the protocol layer, and the other is transaction fee sharing. Thanks to Aster's consistently positive cash flow, it can well support the formation of a stable and sustainable incentive mechanism for the ecosystem, and ecosystem transactions are further endowed with the special significance of maintaining network security.
On the other hand, the repurchase logic can be directly written into smart contracts for automatic execution, making the quantity, price, and address of each repurchase publicly verifiable, avoiding pre-transactions and information asymmetry, while retaining sufficient algorithmic flexibility to allow different repurchase parameters to be used at different stages.
Furthermore, with the launch of Aster Layer 1, the governance scenarios for ASTER tokens in the crypto will be further unlocked. Stakers will participate in on-chain governance voting and ecosystem parameter decisions, allowing the token to assume a more core governance role in the ecosystem.
In conclusion, from developing the Perp DEX product to reconstructing trading infrastructure, Aster is staging a narrative evolution of the underlying operating system for on-chain transactions. This leap from the application layer to the infrastructure layer signifies that Aster is committed to building an ecosystem on which countless trading scenarios can grow.
When global DeFi firms, brokerages, exchanges, and financial institutions can quickly build their own derivatives trading platforms based on Aster's infrastructure, the potential of ASTER tokens in the crypto, as the value carrier of this vast ecosystem, will grow as the ecosystem expands.
Another point worth mentioning is that behind this narrative evolution, Aster also carries a distinct "Binance-affiliated" label: YZi Labs is a backer of Aster, and even more remarkably, on the evening of November 2nd, CZ announced that he had purchased 2.09 million Aster tokens with his own money. This signifies CZ's strong endorsement of Aster and demonstrates that a true influencer in the industry is voting for Aster's future with concrete actions.
From transaction performance to transaction privacy, Aster chose a differentiated competitive path in the Perp DEX market from the very beginning, and quickly seized market share in the Perp DEX market with its actual performance. Now that a new round of competition in the Perp DEX market has begun, will Aster once again stage a "TGE-style explosive growth"?
With Aster Layer 1 expected to launch as early as the end of 2025, let's always look forward to the future of on-chain transactions.
