⚠︎ Risk warning: leveraged derivatives on unregulated platforms — you can lose everything you deposit. Not investment advice.

Comparison · By Stephan Kulik · Updated 2026-09-29

Aster vs ApeX Omni (2026): 0% Maker vs 100x Tiers

Two order-book venues with live tokens and non-crypto perps, priced very differently at the maker side. Aster runs its book on its own L1, Aster Chain, with 0% maker from the first trade and Stage 6 points that its docs tie to an $ASTER airdrop. ApeX Omni matches orders off-chain and settles on zkLink Nova, starts makers at 0.020% and takers at 0.050%, and lowers both through seven levels set by volume or by APEX staked.

At a glance

✓ facts verified 2026-09-24 · each venue's official docs Every cell restates a claim on one of this site's pages: /compare/hyperliquid-vs-aster/ , /aster/fees/ , /eu/aster/ , /apex/ , /apex/how-to-start/ , /apex/fees/ , /airdrops/ .

Fees

Aster — Order-book maker/taker; 0% maker on every perp category, taker by category: Crypto General (USDT- or USD1-quoted) 0.04%, Group B 0.1%, RWA 0.0125%; Shield Mode and 1001x use their own fee rules. Base tier: 0.04% (crypto) / 0.1% (Group B) / 0.0125% (RWA) taker, 0% maker. Taker numeric uses Crypto General pairs (USDT- or USD1-quoted); RWA pairs trade at 0.0125% and Group B pairs at 0.1% — pick per category when calculating. Discounts: 5% off when fees are paid in ASTER; spot VIP grid 4.0→2.3 bps taker by 14-day volume and ASTER held; market-maker rebates to −0.5 bps; referral rebate up to 10% (referrer-configured split, not guaranteed). 0% maker means maker-heavy flow pays nothing — and generates no referral commission. Schedule verified 2026-09-29 on /aster/fees/.

ApeX Omni — Order-book maker/taker; seven VIP levels set daily by 14-day volume or APEX/esAPEX staked. Base tier: 0.050% → 0.025% (by tier) taker, 0.020% → 0% (by tier) maker. Numerics are Level 1; levels are recalculated daily from 14-day Omni Perps volume or APEX/esAPEX staked (staking counts up to Level 4 only). Discounts: Levels 2–7 take taker from 0.045% to 0.025% and maker from 0.015% to 0% (zero maker from $500m of 14-day volume); referral discounts do not stack with VIP levels. Cross margin only, on a settlement layer (zkLink Nova) L2BEAT rates CRITICAL; the docs cap hourly funding at ±0.05% but the symbols API shows wider per-contract fundingMaxRate values on some long-tail markets. Schedule verified 2026-09-24 on /apex/fees/.

Base-tier rates answer one narrow question — what a small taker order costs on day one. Your maker/taker mix, volume tier and holding period decide the real number; the fee comparison lays all 20 venues side by side and the execution-cost tool adds live slippage on top.

Markets they share

In this site's market join, snapshot 2026-10-07, Aster lists 573 perp markets and ApeX Omni lists 128; 123 appear on both. The market index shows every asset with the venues that list it and each venue's published leverage, and the join is refreshed weekly by a fail-closed pipeline. Breadth is not depth: a listing says nothing about how much size a book absorbs, which the execution-cost tool measures live where a venue publishes its order book.

Token and points

• Aster: $ASTER · live (TGE claim window 17 Sep – 17 Oct 2025). Points: Active — Aster Convergence: Stage 6; Calculated weekly; five point categories × team boost, plus two-level referral points; weightings undisclosed. Docs: points "accumulate toward your $ASTER airdrop share at the conclusion of Stage 6". Conversion ratio, Stage 6’s share and the end date are not published.
• ApeX Omni: APEX · live. Points: Ended . The season page says "Ape Season 1 has officially concluded" and "Ape Season 2 is coming soon", with no date and no statement of what Ape Points convert to. APEX is live; Staking 4.0 pays rewards in APEX "funded by weekly buybacks from trading fee revenue". A separate ApeX Social points system (ASPs, 40% of fees paid as points, capped at 300 per 7-day epoch, spent on mystery boxes) is still documented; it pays bonuses and prizes, not a token allocation.

Both rows are restated from the points & airdrop tracker, which is re-read against each venue's docs on a 45-day cadence and never prices a point.

Where Aster wins

Maker cost and the points path. Makers pay 0% on every perp category with nothing to unlock, against ApeX's 0.020% at Level 1. Account Privacy (on by default per the docs) hides balances and positions, no identity step is in the docs, and $ASTER is live with a running points stage whose docs name an airdrop. ApeX's points season is over, and Season 2 is only "coming soon".

Where ApeX Omni wins

Published leverage and a staking route to lower fees. ApeX's symbols API states a leverage cap for every contract — 100x on BTC and ETH, 50x on most others — where Aster's market list does not publish one. Its levels can be bought by staking APEX or esAPEX up to Level 4, and staking pays weekly rewards from fee buybacks. Aster lists more stock-tagged contracts; ApeX keeps its stock, index and commodity perps in a separate TradFi account on Chainlink prices. The Hyperliquid vs ApeX page covers the custody question in detail.

What this site could not verify

• Aster: Audits of the perpetuals trading engine — the published reports cover vault, earn and yield-token contracts.
• Aster: Liquidity depth — not benchmarked by this site.
• Aster: The points-to-token ratio, Stage 6’s share of the airdrop allocation, and the stage’s end date — unpublished.
• ApeX Omni: The liquidation fee rate and the size of any backstop — the liquidation fee funds the Protocol Vault, but no page read on 2026-09-24 states the rate.
• ApeX Omni: What the symbols API field fundingMaxRate means — it reads wider than the documented ±0.05% cap on 39 contracts and the docs do not define it.
• ApeX Omni: What Ape Points convert to, and when Ape Season 2 starts — the season page says only "coming soon".

Which to pick

For zero-cost maker flow, a live token with an active points stage and privacy by default, Aster. For a published leverage cap, a staking route to lower fees and stock or commodity perps beside crypto, after sizing the balance for the L2BEAT finding, ApeX Omni. Aster's Terms bar the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom among eleven named countries; ApeX's Terms bar the United States. The Aster review and the ApeX Omni review carry the detail behind each cell.

Related comparisons

• Aster vs dYdX
• Aster vs edgeX
• Aster vs Paradex
• Aster vs Extended
• Aster vs Pacifica
• Aster vs GMX
• Aster vs GRVT
• Aster vs Variational
• Aster vs SoDEX
• Aster vs Veranta
• Aster vs Nado
• Aster vs Vest Markets
• Aster vs Derive
• Aster vs Ondo Perps
• Hyperliquid vs Aster
• Hyperliquid vs ApeX Omni

FAQ

Which is cheaper for a taker?

Aster at its USDT-perp rate of 0.04% taker, against ApeX's 0.050% at Level 1; ApeX drops to 0.025% only at Level 7. Aster's RWA pairs carry a lower taker rate (0.0125%) and its Group B pairs a higher one (0.1%), shown in the fees table above.

Where are the stock and commodity perps?

On both. Aster's classification tags stock, ETF and commodity contracts in its market list; ApeX keeps them in a separate TradFi account with its own margin pool, closed on weekends and US public holidays.

Is either a safer place to hold funds?

This site has no custody finding against Aster's contracts. ApeX's zkLink Nova settlement is rated CRITICAL by L2BEAT for single-key upgrades with no exit window; see the risk disclosure.