After Hyperliquid and Lighter, Which PerpDEX Will Be the Next Airdrop Goldmine?

Following the recent large airdrop rewards from Hyperliquid and Lighter, airdrop hunters have increasingly shifted their attention toward other potential PerpDEX opportunities. This naturally raises an important question: after Hyperliquid and Lighter, which PerpDEX projects are worth paying attention to next?

Key Takeaways

• PerpDEXs have been structurally “validated” post-Hyperliquid and Lighter: Large-scale airdrops have proven that PerpDEX is still fertile ground for early users, no longer just an experimental narrative.
• Farm capital is rotating at high velocity: After each major airdrop, liquidity is typically withdrawn quickly and redeployed into PerpDEXs that haven’t launched a token yet, allowing pre-TGE projects to benefit directly from this rotation.
• Not all PerpDEXs are created equal: Projects with differentiated architecture, production-ready products, and long-term thinking—such as Variational, ParaDex, edgeX, and SoDEX—have a clear edge over simple incentive-copy models.
• Later airdrops tend to shrink: Historical patterns across previous trends show that latecomers usually offer lower rewards, making it critical to carefully balance farming costs and required volume.
• Farming PerpDEXs is a cost–expectation equation: High trading volume can translate into significant fees, so choosing the right platform and an efficient farming strategy matters far more than the sheer number of projects farmed.

1. Overview of the PerpDEX Market

The official TGE and airdrop events of Hyperliquid and more recently Lighter in late 2025 created a very familiar effect in the crypto market: validation of an entire sector.

Before Hyperliquid, the PerpDEX segment was often viewed as difficult to engage with, niche, high risk, and especially unclear in terms of token launch timelines. However, Lighter’s successful token launch, combined with a substantial airdrop for early users, approximately 25 percent of total supply valued at up to 500 million USD, sent a clear message to the market: PerpDEX remains a hot sector and can deliver outsized rewards for early participants.

Immediately after the airdrop concluded, hundreds of millions of USD flowed out of the Lighter ecosystem. This was not necessarily a negative signal, but rather a familiar behavior among airdrop farmers who lock in profits and rotate capital toward the next opportunity. At this point, the question is no longer whether to farm, but where to farm next.

This is precisely when PerpDEX projects without tokens begin to benefit directly. According to aggregated data from PerpetualPulse, platforms such as edgeX, Variational, Extended, GRVT, and Paradex recorded clear spikes in trading volume after Lighter’s airdrop ended. Simply put, the market is now searching for the next Lighter, and PerpDEX projects that have real products and strong VC backing are becoming the center of attention.

2. Notable PerpDEX Projects

Variational – An Omni PerpDEX With Unique Characteristics

First is Variational, an Omni PerpDEX with several distinctive features. The project is built by two core founders, Lucas and Edward, both alumni of Columbia University and former co-founders of a quantitative investment firm that was later acquired by Genesis Trading. After leaving Genesis in 2021, they founded Variational with a clear vision: bringing quantitative market making, risk management, and OTC derivatives design into the onchain environment.

In 2024, the project completed a 10.3 million USD seed round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Peak XV Partners, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, and other major funds. This investor lineup signals long-term expectations rather than a short-term farming project.

In an increasingly crowded PerpDEX market where most projects compete through incentives and point systems, Variational introduces more interesting mechanics, such as:

• Zero trading fees: Similar to Lighter, but with a key difference. While Lighter primarily charges market makers, Variational does not collect direct fees. Instead, it generates revenue through bid ask spreads controlled by its Omni Liquidity Provider system.
• Loss refunds: Omni uses spread revenue to partially refund traders’ losses. Refunds are distributed via a lottery system, where the probability of winning increases with reward tier. The refund amount equals either the full loss or 20 percent of the total loss refund pool, whichever is lower.

These two features distinguish Variational from other PerpDEX projects due to its unique operating model. In essence, Variational acts as the sole market maker. Users do not trade against external makers, but directly against the platform’s internal system. Variational sets a spread of approximately 4 to 6 basis points and then opens a hedging position on external venues. Its profit comes from the price difference between internal and external markets, not traditional trading fees.

The key point is that the larger the spread, the more Variational benefits, and according to community testing, the higher the user’s point weighting. In derivatives markets, spreads are typically smaller for highly liquid assets like BTC and ETH, especially during peak hours. In contrast, lower liquidity altcoins tend to have wider spreads, meaning each trade generates more value for the system.

Timing also plays a role. Low liquidity periods such as weekends or Asian night hours often have wider spreads. For the same trade size, users earn significantly more points compared to trading during peak sessions.

ParaDex – A PerpDEX Incubated by Paradigm

Previously, ParaDex was better known as an options DEX with an institutional focus, excelling in complex product design and serving professional traders. Since the second half of 2025, ParaDex has undergone a major transformation and quickly achieved early success. At the time of writing, cumulative trading volume has exceeded 200 billion USD, placing ParaDex among the top six PerpDEX platforms by volume.

The most distinctive aspect of ParaDex is its origin and team background. ParaDex is incubated by Paradigm, an institutional liquidity platform in crypto, not the well known Paradigm venture fund, but still a heavyweight in derivatives trading. Founded in 2019, Paradigm focuses on serving hedge funds, market makers, and private capital firms, with an emphasis on crypto options and institutional grade derivatives.

The collapse of FTX dealt a severe blow to Paradigm, not only in partnerships but also in trust toward centralized infrastructure. This shock became the catalyst for building ParaDex as a fully onchain derivatives ecosystem, where everything from order matching to margin management is controlled by the protocol.

Thanks to years of derivatives research and operations, ParaDex offers a rare product suite for a DEX. It supports spot trading, perpetuals, perpetual futures, and perpetual options, forming a comprehensive derivatives ecosystem rather than focusing on a single product.

One of ParaDex’s most important innovations is its unified margin system, implemented very early, even earlier than Hyperliquid. All trades occur within a single account, allowing users to use any asset as collateral and choose between isolated margin, cross margin, or hybrid margin. This approach improves capital efficiency and reduces idle collateral.

Notably, ParaDex currently charges zero trading fees, a deliberate strategy to attract liquidity and trading behavior ahead of its token launch. Beyond direct trading, ParaDex also expands into vaults and capital management. Its official vault currently offers around 13.5 percent APR with TVL of 105.4 million USD. Depositors receive LP tokens representing shares, which can be integrated with DeFi protocols such as Pendle, Morpho, and Aave.

edgeX – A PerpDEX Powered by StarkEx Technology

edgeX is a decentralized perpetual exchange built on an offchain orderbook with onchain settlement, leveraging StarkEx ZK rollup technology for trade recording and verification. This design enables CEX level execution speed and low latency while maintaining self custody and onchain transparency.

edgeX follows a modular architecture where each layer serves a distinct function:

• Orderbook Engine offchain: Handles high speed order matching, reducing blockchain load and delivering smooth trading performance.
• Settlement Layer onchain: All matched trade results, including price, size, and position state, are recorded onchain via StarkEx, ensuring verifiability and full asset ownership.
• Liquidity Pool: edgeX uses a multi asset liquidity pool model that shares liquidity across multiple derivatives products, improving capital efficiency, reducing slippage, and mitigating liquidity fragmentation common in traditional DEXs.

Key Products and Features

• Trade: A core trading interface with real time charts, deep orderbooks, support for market, limit, and stop limit orders, adjustable leverage, and full display of PnL, margin ratio, funding rates, and open interest.
• eStrategy: An onchain vault management section allowing users to track TVL, APR, and performance of each strategy.
• Earn: A unified yield hub aggregating rewards, rebates, vault returns, and a tiered affiliate program with transparent commissions.

Overall, edgeX represents the new generation of high performance PerpDEXs, where CEX speed meets DeFi transparency. With clear architecture, a mature product, and strong scalability, edgeX has become one of the top targets for post Lighter PerpDEX farming capital.

SoDEX – Leveraging a Massive User Ecosystem

Finally, SoDEX is a decentralized PerpDEX using an onchain orderbook, incubated by SoSoValue and built directly on ValueChain, a high performance Layer 1 designed to deliver CEX grade trading experiences onchain with scalability and transparency.

SoDEX is not just a perpetual exchange, but a multi product trading platform supporting spot, perpetuals, futures, and potentially RWA and other tokenized assets. This creates a much larger canvas for user and liquidity provider interaction before the official token distribution.

SoDEX operates with a fully onchain orderbook, meaning all orders and trades are processed transparently onchain. Combined with a modular architecture and dedicated appchains for spot and perpetuals, this design delivers high performance, near zero gas fees, and superior transparency.

A key advantage is its connection to SoSoValue, one of the most widely used crypto market data platforms with tens of millions of users and significant protocol revenue. SoSoValue previously conducted a large airdrop, and recently announced additional ecosystem incentives worth nearly 70 million USD for the SoSoValue ecosystem.

SoDEX has also introduced a detailed Sopoint system similar to Lighter’s points, signaling strong expectations for retroactive rewards.

At present, there are many attractive PerpDEX opportunities. However, the sheer number of projects increases the risk that later token launches and airdrops deliver diminishing returns. This has played out before, most notably in the Layer 2 trend, where early projects like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Starknet delivered large airdrops, while later entrants offered significantly smaller rewards.

The PerpDEX trend is likely similar. Users should carefully balance fees and capital allocation, as farming volume on PerpDEX platforms can be costly.

3. Conclusion

With the Lighter airdrop now behind us and delivering meaningful rewards, the search for the next Lighter has become a major topic in the crypto market. Variational, Extended, and ParaDex represent three different approaches, but share a crucial common trait: they are not built solely for farming, but are PerpDEX platforms with clear product vision, long term strategies, and the ability to expand beyond pure DeFi use cases.

This concludes the insights shared in this article. Hopefully, it has provided useful perspective for those navigating the next phase of PerpDEX opportunities.

Disclaimer: This content does not constitute investment, tax, legal, financial, or accounting advice. MEXC provides this information for educational purposes only. Always do your own research, understand the risks, and invest responsibly.