Perps didn’t just “rise.”
They erased the old fee hierarchy and rebuilt it around trading behaviour instead of capital.
Hyperliquid clearing $110M in 30-day fees on $266B volume and Jupiter Perps doing $80.33M on a totally different architecture are pointing to the same structural shift:
the systems tied to flow now print more than the systems tied to liquidity.
Look at the receipts:
• @HyperliquidX: $105M fees / $95.73M revenue
• @JupiterExchange: $75M fees / $18.6M revenue
• @edgeX_exchange: $68.7M / $49.6M
• @Lighter_xyz: $27.1M fees / $27.1M revenue
• @GMX_IO — $5.1M fees / $1.8M revenue
Now compare to the “old guard”:
• @Uniswap: $93.4M fees
• @aave v3: $85.9M fees / $10.8M revenue
• @CurveFinance: $13.4M fees / $6.4M revenue
The fees are huge, but none of them match perp engines on earnings efficiency.
The reason is structural, not narrative:
Lending = deposit behaviour
AMMs = liquidity behaviour
Perps = trading behaviour
Trading behaviour is the only one that scales with volatility, leverage, liquidations, hedging, and momentum; the things that actually move money on-chain.
That’s why perps monetize reflexive cycles while lending and swaps flatten out when activity cools.
Three design truths flipped the fee stack:
1. Behaviour > deposits:
Every trade is revenue. TVL becomes optional, not foundational.
2. Volatility > optimism:
Perps print in both directions. AMMs and lenders do not.
3. Execution > liquidity:
Latency, oracles, unified margin, and liquidation engines compound revenue more than TVL does.
@HyperliquidX didn’t need incentives.
@JupiterExchange didn’t need a farm.
When the engine is correct, flow pays for itself.
Perps aren’t an appendix to DeFi anymore.
They are the fee economy.
Everything else sits downstream of execution.
This isn’t a phase.
It’s the new structure.
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