Ratings · Measured, not sponsored
Perpetual DEXs
Every venue here publishes rules for liquidation, funding and settlement. The rules are cheap to keep on a quiet day, so we ranked these venues on what they actually did on the days when keeping them would have cost the house money.
More fees in thirty days than the rest of this page combined — and a market it delisted and settled by vote in about two minutes.
No delist button, no forced settlement in four years. You pay for that in depth: one thirty-fourth of Hyperliquid’s fee flow.
An order book that proves its own matching with zero-knowledge proofs. Young, and the proofs are hard for outsiders to audit.
What we did · August 27, 2026We catalogued every documented intervention — forced settlements, delistings, socialised losses, oracle changes — because on a perpetual venue the rules only matter on the days it would be expensive to keep them. Then we measured where the flow and the collateral actually are.
A live market was settled by vote in two minutes
26 March 2025. A trader pushed Hyperliquid’s own market-making vault to $13.5m of unrealised loss on the JELLY perpetual. The validator set voted to delist the market and settled every position at $0.0095.
Users other than the flagged addresses were reimbursed from the Hyper Foundation, so nobody innocent was left out of pocket — and that matters. So does the precedent: on the venue with the deepest on-chain book in existence, a small group can rewrite live positions in minutes when the house is the one losing. We score both halves, and the settlement record carries 30% here.
One venue, and a long tail
Depth is not a vanity metric on a leveraged venue — it is what decides whether your stop fills near your stop. The concentration above is the single most important practical fact in this category, and it pulls directly against the governance concerns on the venue at the top of it.
The ranking
Click any row for the quick read, or open a company for its full profile and per-criterion scores. Measured August 27, 2026. How we rate.
HOW WE SCORED THIS — CRITERIA AND WEIGHTS+
A perpetual exchange is a promise that your position will be settled by rules, not by a decision. The rules are easy to publish and easy to keep on a quiet day, so this rating is built almost entirely on what each venue did on the days it was actually tested — the liquidation cascades, the manipulated markets, the moments when honouring the rules would have cost the house money.
Every intervention on record: forced settlements, delistings, socialised losses, auto-deleveraging events and oracle changes, with dates and amounts. Hyperliquid settled an entire manipulated market at a chosen price and delisted it by validator vote in March 2025, then reimbursed users from a foundation. That is a specific, documented answer to “who decides”, and it is worth more than any decentralisation claim on a landing page.
Collateral and vault value locked at a stated timestamp, alongside thirty days of protocol fees as the closest public proxy for real flow. Depth on a perpetual venue is not a comfort — it is what decides whether your stop fills near your stop.
Published taker and maker fees, plus the funding mechanism as documented — and then our own division: thirty days of protocol fees, annualised, per dollar of collateral held. That last number is the intensity of extraction at each venue, and no fee page shows it.
Whether margin sits in a contract you can verify or on a company balance sheet, who runs the sequencer or validator set, and how upgrades and market listings are authorised. A venue where a small set of operators can pause, list or settle is a custodian with extra steps.
Markets listed, chains supported, and the practical route in and out — a venue that only accepts one collateral asset on one chain is narrower than its market count suggests.
Weights sum to 100. If we cannot verify a criterion, we delete it rather than score it on impressions — read the methodology.
Is there a free alternative?
The honest verdict on this category is that most people trading perpetuals lose money, and the venue is not the reason.
Funding costs compound against you, leverage converts ordinary volatility into liquidation, and the 10 October 2025 cascade wiped out roughly $19bn of positions across the market in a day — many of them on perfectly functioning venues, priced by oracles reading order books that were briefly wrong. If you are going to trade here anyway: use the venue with the deepest book for your market, size the position so a 20% adverse move does not close it, and read what each venue has actually done when its own vault was underwater. That last part is this page.
What changed since last time
- 2026-08-27Category published.Every comparison ranks perp venues on fees and volume. Neither predicts what happens to your position on the day the venue’s own market maker is losing.
Questions
Which perpetual DEX is the biggest?+
Hyperliquid, and it is not close: $63.3m of protocol fees over thirty days, more than every other venue on this page combined, with $6.84bn of value in its ecosystem. Jupiter Perps is second at $15.8m. On depth and execution quality it is the strongest venue in the category by our measurement — which makes what it did in March 2025 more important, not less.
What happened with Hyperliquid and JELLY?+
On 26 March 2025 a trader opened roughly $4.05m of long and $4.1m of matching short exposure in the JELLY perpetual across three fresh accounts, then bought JELLY on spot venues until Hyperliquid’s own market-making vault was about $13.5m underwater. The validator set convened, voted within roughly two minutes to delist the market, and settled every position at a chosen price of $0.0095. Users other than the flagged addresses were reimbursed from the Hyper Foundation. Two things are true: the users were made whole, and a small group rewrote live positions in minutes in the direction that suited the house.
Is a perp DEX safer than a centralised exchange?+
It removes the custody risk and keeps almost everything else. Your margin sits in a contract rather than on a company balance sheet, which is a real improvement over the venues that have failed with customer funds. But liquidation, oracle pricing, auto-deleveraging and market listing are all still decisions someone makes, and on several venues here a small operator set can make them quickly. Read the settlement record before the fee schedule.
What actually costs me money on these venues?+
Rarely the headline taker fee. Funding payments compound against a position held through a trending market, oracle pricing decides your liquidation rather than the price you can see, and thin depth turns a stop into a much worse fill than the number on the screen. On 10 October 2025 roughly $19bn of positions were liquidated market-wide in a day, much of it on venues that were working exactly as designed — priced by oracles reading books that were briefly wrong.
Which venue is hardest to interfere with?+
GMX, on the evidence: pooled liquidity, oracle-priced execution, no operator with a delist button and four years without a forced settlement of user positions. The price of that is depth — $1.87m of thirty-day fees against Hyperliquid’s $63.3m, and thin flow means worse fills. That is the real trade in this category, and no venue has yet solved both ends of it.
How this is funded
It is not. There are no affiliate links on this page or anywhere on this site, no paid placements, and no sponsored positions. Nobody in this table can buy a place in it, accelerate their inclusion, or influence a score — and none of them paid us anything, because there is nothing here to buy. The full policy.