Coverage on Hyperliquid, GMX, Lighter, gTrade and Pacifica

📝 Editor's Note:

Welcome to OurNetwork's latest.

But first, a quick note that the AWS outage + an issue with our publishing platform delayed this edition's publication until Oct. 21. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

With that, let's get into Perp DEXs, a sector of crypto which Hyperliquid, a Layer 1, has ignited with its success over the past year.

That success has drawn competitors like Lighter and Pacifica, as well as resurfacing established names like GMX and gTrade.

Luckily, Reuben, Chaos Labs, Oğuz, Joseph, and Oluwole dug into the five protocols above this week. Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

Hyperliquid | GMX | Lighter | gTrade | Pacifica

• Hyperliquid is a high-speed Layer-1 DEX for onchain perpetuals, combining CEX-grade performance with DeFi transparency. With its assets bridged to Arbitrum for broader access, it has processed over $2.39T in perpetual volume this year while sustaining a leading market share of at least 30%. Between May and September 2025, open interest surged by 154%, rising from $158B to $403B, signaling growing trader conviction and deep onchain liquidity.

• Hyperliquid’s 2025 run saw five straight months of growth, peaking with +33% in May and a massive +47% rebound in July that led to August’s all-time high. Even after fall pullbacks, volumes remain nearly 6x higher year-over-year — proof of deep liquidity and sustained trader momentum.

• BTC and ETH dominate with $1.5T+ volume (~60% share), while SOL cements its spot as traders’ altcoin favorite. HYPE leads in activity with 108M trades, driven by retail energy. Memecoins like FARTCOIN, TRUMP, kPEPE, PUMP, and kBONK add $100B+, fueling Hyperliquid’s speculative pulse.

• GMX’s ecosystem shows consistent liquidity depth and trader activity across the Arbitrum and Avalanche networks, with aggregate total value locked (TVL) exceeding $500M. The protocol’s largest daily fee spike reached $1M. On July 31, GMX v2 collected $1M in trading fees, its highest since launch. The Oct. 10 flash crash generated $70,000 in liquidation fees, with more than $115M in total liquidation volume handled without interruption. GMX liquidity providers continue to generate competitive returns.

• Aside from Arbitrum, GMX is now live across Avalanche, Botanix, Base, and BNB Chain. Avalanche leads with $23M in TVL, followed by Botanix at $7.5M, showing steady growth across new deployments. This expansion diversifies liquidity and strengthens GMX’s execution network.

• Chaos' Risk Oracles powers GMX’s real-time monitoring of open-interest caps, funding rates, and price impact parameters, securing over $450M in TVL across 126 assets and three chains, with all key risk parameters continuously verified onchain.

• Lighter started to see huge inflows after switching to the public mainnet following 8 months of private beta. Despite last week's crash and huge withdrawals, it continues to maintain a $1B level of TVL.

• There was significant surge in new user metrics just before the public mainnet release on Oct. 2. At the time of writing, Oct. 15, 243K unique addresses had deposited funds to Lighter; however, only 23.6K of them deposited more than 5K USDC.

• The "10/10 crash" similarly impacted the TVL's of major perp DEXs like Lighter, Aster, and Hyperliquid. Will Lighter maintain its growing market share, or will we see a significant drop post-airdrop? Time will tell.

• Driven by buybacks and burns, GNS is the largest beneficiary of gTrade's revenue. Over 1% of supply has been burned in the last 30 days alone, and over 9% in the past 6 months, resulting in high deflationary pressure on the token. With that, Gains Network is consistently in the Top 30 for Token Holder Revenues. GNS can also be used as collateral to trade over 280 markets. Q4 will deepen this link with traders further with features like staked GNS fee discounts and potential trader-facing redistributions of buybacks.

• DEGEN pairs (which offer 500x leverage, 0.02% fee, and zero slippage) now drive a major share of gTrade's volume. Live since late 2024, they’ve seen rapid adoption which solidifies gTrade as a top destination for high-leverage scalpers and continues to be a key volume driver for GNS holder revenue.

• With over 30 RWA pairs (stocks, forex, commodities, and indices), gTrade is positioned to lead the RWA-perp meta. Plus, as the overlap between TradFi and crypto assets increases, RWA pairs already drive significant volume on key days showcasing real demand and gTrade’s readiness to capture it.

• Pacifica is a Solana-native perps DEX that launched in January 2025, quickly carving out a niche amid the Hyperliquid-led boom. It is self-funded and emphasizes hybrid execution — off-chain order matching for speed and onchain settlement for verifiability. For a product still in closed Beta, growth has been meteoric; over $20B cumulative volume in under 10 months. Recent updates (50% fee discounts until Oct 6, 2025; $50K daily deposit/withdrawal limits) have fueled a 50% weekly volume spike.

• While Jupiter Perps still leads on Solana by TVL and OI. Pacifica flipped Jupiter to be the chain's #1 perp DEX by weekly volume as of late September 2025. USD inflows into Pacifica are steadily increasing compared to Jupiter perps.

• In terms of user retention and growth, Pacifica currently has almost 20,000 unique users, with an average of 200 new users daily, and 5,000 daily active users. The limited pairs selection (25 markets) is a feature that can be improved to attract new users.