⚠︎ Risk warning: leveraged derivatives on unregulated platforms — you can lose everything you deposit. Not investment advice.
Earning Possibilities, Compared Across Venues
The companion table to our guide to earning on perp DEXs: strategy by strategy, what each covered venue actually offers. Two rules govern every cell. First, a cell only states what we've verified against the venue's official documentation — click through to the source page for detail and the verification date. Second, where we haven't verified something, the cell says so outright — an honest "not verified" beats a plausible guess, and an empty-looking cell should never be read as "this venue has nothing."
Working through one strategy rather than the whole grid? The strategy explorer pairs each strategy with its risk profile and live rates, and the earning scenarios tool shows what an amount and risk appetite face at current rates.
| Strategy | Hyperliquid | Aster | dYdX | GMX | Lighter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Funding (cadence & mechanics) What a funding-arbitrage position would collect or pay, and how often. | Hourly, peer-to-peer between longs and shorts; the exchange keeps none of it. details · live data | 8-hour default interval, adjustable per contract; actual per-symbol interval published via the official API (1h/4h/8h all in use). details | Hourly; rate = premium component ÷ 8 + interest component, per official docs. details | Different model: two-way funding plus a borrowing fee paid by the larger-open-interest side. details | 1-hour funding period per the contract specifications (per-market configurable — newer markets could differ); formula unpublished. details |
| Liquidity vaults / pools Deposit and earn the house side of trading flow — and its losses. | HLP (protocol market-making + liquidations, PnL shared) and user-run vaults with leader profit share. details | ALP pool: holders are the market-maker counterparty for perp trades; NAV accrues trading P&L, fees, funding, and liquidations — and absorbs trader wins. Dynamic mint/burn fees, 48h burn lockup after minting. details | MegaVault (deposit USDC into automated market-making) is being wound down — the community voted to remove its operator and restrict it to closing existing positions only; not a live earning route. details | GM pools back each market and act as trader counterparty; depositors earn a share of fees. details | LLP: the protocol-run public pool — deposit, receive shares, results shared after the operator fee — alongside community-operated pools. details |
| Copy-trade vaults Delegate to another trader; inherit their results minus a cut. | User vaults: on-chain track records, leader profit share. details | Aster Vaults: a manager trades pooled deposits; P&L shared proportionally by ownership share, per-vault lock-up, 0–100% manager profit share. details | No copy-trade product in dYdX's docs — MegaVault (in wind-down) is the extent of its pooled products; there's no route to follow a specific trader. details | No copy-trading product in GMX's docs — in the pool model, depositors back all traders collectively rather than following one. details | Public Pools: a designated operator trades the combined funds; you receive pool shares and results after the operator fee — delegated trading, wins and losses alike. details |
| Points program Activity now for a token allocation later — value unknown until the venue publishes it. | ENDED November 2024 — no documented active program; 2026 "farming guides" are speculation. details | Active (Stage 6 verified), with an official $ASTER airdrop commitment. details | No points program among dYdX's documented reward mechanisms; per-trade DYDX trading rewards exist in the protocol but their multiplier is currently set to 0 by governance — effectively off. details | No points program in GMX's docs — its documented earning routes are LP pools, referrals, and the (currently suspended) GMX staking. details | Active weekly points (Season 2, Fridays; 200k/week retail pool); LIT is live, but no points→LIT conversion is documented — airdrop expectations are speculation. details |
| Staking Stake the venue token for rewards and/or fee discounts. | HYPE staking: delegated to validators; adds fee discounts of 5% up to 40% by amount staked. details | ASTER staking live on Aster Chain: delegate to validators; weekly-epoch rewards from fixed pools plus a 99%-of-fees buyback stream; locks up to 208 weeks, early exits penalized on a time-scaled formula (docs example the min/max rates at 2%/60%). APY shown in-app as per-epoch estimates only. details | DYDX staking: modest estimated APR via the app (third-party provided), plus a governance-voted fee-discount grid — staked (bonded) DYDX cuts fees 25%–50% at the entry fee tiers, 5%–10% at whale tiers. details | GMX staking exists, but reward distribution is currently suspended: a DAO-approved 27% of protocol fees buys back GMX, which accumulates in the treasury until the venue's documented distribution trigger. Not a live yield today. details | LIT staking: 6% APR, a discount grid on Premium fees, and a second documented reward stream — all LIT Fee Credits proceeds are streamed daily to stakers. details |
| Referral benefit (for you as referee) What signing up through a referral link gives the trader. | 4% fee discount on the first $25M volume. details | Up to 10% fee rebate — the split is the referrer’s choice, not guaranteed — plus a 1.2x points boost via the invite page. details | Start at fee tier 3 (dYdX quotes up to $550 saved); boost duration not documented. details | 5% discount on open/close position fees at tier 1. details | No cash referral program — points-based referrals only. details |
Live funding, cross-venue
Funding is the one input here that changes hour to hour. The table below fetches BTC funding directly from each venue's official public API in your browser — now for four venues (GMX remains excluded, with the reason shown in its row). Each venue's rate period has since been pinned against official sources — dYdX all the way down to the indexer's source code, Aster via its documented per-symbol interval endpoint — so alongside the raw native-period rates, the table now shows a normalized per-day column that IS directly comparable. It remains a snapshot of current rates, not a forecast. Hyperliquid's full every-market table lives at funding rates, live.
| Venue | BTC funding (live, native period) | ≈ per day on $1,000 | What the number is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperliquid | … | … | |
| dYdX | … | … | |
| Aster | … | … | |
| Lighter | … | … | |
| GMX | — | — | No public funding endpoint verified — different fee model (borrowing + funding); see the GMX fees page. |
Fetching from each venue’s official public API in your browser… The raw column shows each venue's native reporting period (hourly on Hyperliquid, dYdX, and Lighter; per-interval on Aster). The per-day column normalizes them using each venue's verified period — it's a snapshot of the current rate held for a day, not a forecast. Positive = longs pay shorts.
Live vault & pool yields
The vaults row above now has live numbers too — for exactly the venues it covers. HLP's figure comes from Hyperliquid's official vault API (its methodology isn't documented, so it's presented as the venue's own number); GMX's come from its official Oracle API, showing the top pools by 7-day fee APY, which by definition excludes the pool's exposure to trader profit and loss. The full mechanics and risks live on the Hyperliquid vaults page and the GMX review; the earning guide explains why a vault yield is never a savings rate.
| Vault / pool | Venue-reported yield | What the number is |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperliquid — HLP (protocol vault) | … | venue-reported APR from the official vaultDetails API; the docs don't define its methodology or trailing period — treat it as Hyperliquid's own figure, and note it can be (and sometimes is) negative |
| GMX pool #1 | … | |
| GMX pool #2 | … | |
| GMX pool #3 | … | |
| GMX pool #4 | … | |
| GMX pool #5 | … |
Fetching from each venue’s official API in your browser… These are the venues' own published figures, not our estimates, and not forecasts — vault returns are realized results that can be negative, and GMX's fee APY excludes the pool's exposure to trader profit and loss. Read the risk framing in our earning guide before treating any of these as income.
How to read this table
A venue with more offerings isn't automatically "better" — breadth is a feature, not a verdict. The strategy-by-strategy risk framing is the guide's job: every strategy here is a claim on trading fees or on other traders' losses, and each carries its own failure mode. As of 2026-07-30 every cell is verified: where a venue offers a strategy, the cell restates the linked page's verified facts, and where it doesn't, the cell states the verified absence from the venue's own documentation — never a guess either way. If a cell ever shows "not verified" again, it means a new row or venue landed ahead of its verification, tracked in our backlog. This table covers what venues offer; what they charge is the fee comparison, and the product surface itself — spot markets, stock/RWA/prediction products, access, collateral — is the feature comparison. For platform choice overall, see the best perp DEX rankings.
Source pages linked from each cell carry that claim's verification date against official documentation. Some linked pages contain disclosed referral links; see our methodology.