Ondo Finance’s perpetuals decentralized exchange (DEX), launched less than a month ago, has seen its daily trading volume double to over $300 million, while cumulative volume has reached nearly $6 billion. This growth has occurred despite a broader crypto market decline, positioning Ondo to challenge established rivals like Hyperliquid, AsterDEX, and Lighter. The platform’s Open Interest (OI) has hit a new peak of $74.77 million, driven by demand for tokenized equities, commodities, and indices. Despite this trading activity, the price of ONDO remains in a bear market structure.
Ondo Finance officially launched its perps DEX trading platform less than a month ago. It is slowly cementing its place as a top perps DEX platform, even though its price is lagging.
The native token, ONDO, commands a market cap of $1.87 billion even in a bearish market. Its daily perps DEX volume has been growing alongside its Open Interest (OI), suggesting it could soon compete with established platforms.
Ondo’s perps volume has doubled from the launch volume recorded on July 7. The volume rose from $128 million to over $300 million.
The cumulative Ondo perps volume hit a new high of $5.996 billion three weeks after its launch. On July 31, it was fourth among all perp DEXs in terms of the volume of tokenized equities traded, ahead of Lighter and AsterDEX.
Its OI hit a new peak level of $74.77 million. This indicated that Ondo perps DEX was becoming traders’ preferred platform.
Tokenized equities, indices, and commodities fueled the sharp increase in perps volume. They included instruments like Nvidia, Tesla, oil, gold, and the S&P 500 with up to 20x leverage traded 24/7.
Trading of tokenized US oil on Ondo increased by 59.3% over the past 30 days. More assets, like the iShares Systematic Bond ETF, are slowly being added to the platform.
All of Ondo’s growth happened against the backdrop of declining perps and DEX volume for the broader crypto market. July closed as another red month for on-chain activity, with both DEX and Perps volume hitting new yearly lows, down over 60% from their peaks in October.
As Ondo’s perps volume diverged from the broader market trend, it posed a serious threat to Aster and Lighter if growth continues at this speed. Eventually, it could challenge Hyperliquid, which has a Normalized Daily Volume of $10.74 billion. Hyperliquid’s volume is almost 6x bigger than that of Aster and Lighter at $1.85 billion and $1.35 billion.
