📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest. Crypto markets have climbed steadily, gaining 8.8% in the past week as of Apr. 29. This represents a $250B increase in total market capitalization, pushing the sector above $3T for only the third time in its history.

Our focus today — derivatives platforms, whose financial instruments derive value from underlying crypto assets. These protocols have become increasingly central to the ecosystem — perpetual futures offered by the six platforms included in this issue generate over $300M in daily volume according to Artemis.

As the market heats up, sophisticated investors are turning to these platforms not just to hold assets, but to amplify returns and manage risk exposure beyond traditional spot positions.

In this issue we have the following six players — Drift, GMX, Hyperliquid, Vertex, gTrade, and Contango.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

Drift | GMX | Hyperliquid | Vertex | Gains Network | Contango

• Drift is an all-in-one DeFi platform built on Solana. Open interest (OI) on Drift's perpetuals market remained strong over the past 90 days despite a broader market downturn. Drift's OI ranged between $145M and $205M. For much of the 90 days, Drift's OI remained higher than daily trading volume on the platform demonstrating considerable OI-to-volume strength compared with other venues. Drift's SOL-PERP, the Solana token's perpetual futures contract, remained the leader, making up around 60% of OI on Drift's perp market.

• Similar to OI, Drift's total value locked (TVL) remained strong around $1B during broader market weakness across the last 90 days. Strong demand for, and performance of, Drift Strategy Vaults, has been one of the primary drivers of the resilience of both OI and TVL.

• Strategy Vaults are permissionless vaults on Drift enabling vault managers to execute strategies on behalf of depositors. Since launch, 318 Strategy Vaults have been deployed on Drift and account for around $280M of TVL deposited by 21,052 unique depositor accounts.

• GMX generated a significant revenue on Apr. 7, collecting $13.68M in fees, primarily from $13.24M worth of liquidations on V1 of of the protocol. The spike resulted from the deleveraging of large BTC perpetual positions on Avalanche, during early April's market volatility, as a bullish trader had their convictions cut short by macro events which caused big movements in BTC. Recent protocol changes now direct these revenues toward GMX token buybacks, which are distributed to stakers, who saw yields rise above 100%.

• Total revenue for GMX have now elevated to new heights of $112.25M, growing on average $3.90M year to date, with an annualized projected revenue of $46.83M. This comes after 22 new market listings year-to-date. These listings include DOLO, TRUMP, CAKE, and others.

• Trader's profit-and-loss (PnL) on GMX V2 has trailed downward, now at -$9.54M, despite recent market volatility. There's a continuous pattern emerging, following major price swings in either direction, counterparties experience accelerated liquidations. These cascading liquidations amplify losses, creating a whipsaw effect.

• Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual exchange built on its own high-performance Layer 1 blockchain, setting a new standard for onchain trading. Since early 2024, its trading volume has surged —accelerating after the token generation event (TGE) of the HYPE token— and consistently reached $30B to $60B USD weekly, driving cumulative volume to over $1.3T by early 2025. This growth highlights Hyperliquid’s rapid rise and increasing popularity.

• Hyperliquid launched perpetuals trading in September 2023 and rapidly grew its market share, reaching nearly 60% by mid-2025. This growth highlights Hyperliquid’s strong advantages in liquidity, performance, and user experience compared to other decentralized exchanges.

• Initially fragmented across many tokens, Hyperliquid’s trading activity shifted by April 2025, with BTC-USDC capturing ~50%, ETH-USDC ~20%, and SOL-USDC ~10% of volume. This concentration shows strong user preference for large-cap assets and growing institutional adoption.

• Vertex is a spot & perpetuals orderbook exchange that uniquely enables synchronized orderbook liquidity sourced from multiple blockchains. Vertex can be deployed on any chain compatible with the Ethereum Virutal Machine (EVM), meaning users can access a proven, high-performance exchange while earning rewards in native ecosystem tokens by trading from different chains. The chart below illustrates the economic benefit afforded to Vertex users, where traders collectively earn over $100,000 in average weekly rewards.

• Vertex ranks in the top five derivative exchanges based on key metrics including weekly, monthly & yearly notional trading volumes. Including Hyperliquid (not displayed on Token Terminal), Vertex currently ranks fourth in terms of cumulative notional trading volume amongst derivatives exchanges over the past year.

• As Vertex expands cross-chain, it diversifies trading and fee revenue. Since Q2 started, trading volume spans nine chains, with Sei, Avalanche, Sonic, and Arbitrum each surpassing 10% of cumulative volume on average — marking the most distributed contribution of trading activity and fees to date.

• Live since 2021, gTrade, Gains Network's battle-tested perpetuals exchange, has nearly $100B in lifetime volume and over over $60M in lifetime revenue. Built without VC-backing or token inflation, it’s powered entirely by a sustainable onchain model. Traders get centralized exchange-like performance with full self-custody, zero slippage on major assets, and access to over 290 markets across crypto, forex, and commodities.

• Gains consistently ranks in the top 20 for token holder revenue on DefiLlama. The protocol accomplishes this by using 55% of the protocol's trading fees and a dynamic percentage of negative trader PnL to buyback & burn GNS, Gains' native token. Holders benefit from this deflationary pressure as over 9.5% of the total GNS supply has been burned the last six months.

• Arbitrum, the Layer 2, is gTrade’s main hub, driving over 80% of the exchange's TVL and volumes. gTrade remains live on Polygon and expanded to Base, a Layer 2, in September 2024. Trading activity is growing steadily on Base.

• Open interest on Contango has always been skewed in favor of blue-chip liquid staking tokens and liquid restaking token loops, such as wstETH-ETH (currently 30% of total OI) or weETH-ETH (18%). In recent months, however, stablecoin loops have grown in popularity, racking up 30% of total OI. Most of these loops are on yield-bearing stables, such as srUSD-rUSD, as users want to lever up on that native yield. Similarly, Pendle's PTs have also become a popular choice, representing around 8% of total OI.

• In Q1, Morpho overtook Aave as the main lending market both in terms of volume and OI, due to increased popularity of wstETH and weETH loops on mainnet. On a related note, Contango has been the main frontend for Morpho on Base since its launch there.

• In Q1 of 2025, Contango's TVL increased in ETH terms despite market slowdown, reaching 17,500 ETH, up 34% quarter-over-quarter. Similarly, OI kept growing in ETH terms — it was 168,200 ETH at the end of Q1, up 8% quarter-over-quarter.