⚠︎ Risk warning: leveraged derivatives on unregulated platforms — you can lose everything you deposit. Not investment advice.
Platform Features, Compared Across Venues
The five venues we cover all trade crypto perpetuals — after that, they diverge fast. This table compares the product surface itself: what model executes your trade, whether there's spot alongside the perps, which venues go beyond crypto (stock perps, RWA markets, prediction-style products), what signing up requires, and what funds an account. Two rules govern every cell. First, a cell only restates what our per-venue pages have verified against official documentation — the links in each cell carry the 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.
| Feature | Hyperliquid | Aster | dYdX | GMX | Lighter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trading model What actually sits on the other side of your order. | Purpose-built L1 running a fully on-chain order book — every order, cancel, and fill on-chain, no per-trade gas fee. details | Central limit order book in the BNB Chain ecosystem, with two perp contract families split by collateral. details | Order book on its own Cosmos-SDK app-chain; the longest operating history among major perp DEXs. details | No order book — GM/GLV liquidity pools are the direct counterparty to every trade, on Arbitrum and Avalanche. details | zk-rollup on Ethereum; order matching and liquidations backed by zk validity proofs rather than a trusted matching engine. details |
| Spot & swaps Trading that isn’t a leveraged derivative. | Spot order book alongside perps — 0.070% taker / 0.040% maker at the base tier. details | Spot markets alongside both perp families — 0.005% maker / 0.04% taker. details | The "Spot" tab is a Solana memecoin terminal (quick-buy presets, holder counts) — not spot BTC/ETH. details | Pool-based spot swaps priced by pool balance, including stablecoin and atomic swap types. details | Not verified / not covered yet — no guess. |
| Beyond crypto perps Markets past the standard crypto perp list. | Stock & commodity perps via HIP-3 builder-deployed markets, plus HIP-4 Yes/No outcome markets (fully collateralized — no leverage, no liquidations). details 1 · details 2 | Equity-style "Stock" markets, a Predictions tab pricing shares as probabilities, and a separate 1001x Simple/Degen mode on select pairs. details | Not verified / not covered yet — no guess. | Not verified / not covered yet — no guess. | The broadest RWA surface here: individual stocks, forex, commodities, US equity indices (futures-tracked 23/5), pre-IPO names (isolated-only, no price caps), and prelaunch pre-TGE token perps backed by a separate XLP pool. details |
| Login & KYC What it takes to start trading — and who is excluded. | Wallet or email login; no identity-verification step. US persons blocked under its terms. details | Web3 wallet or email signup; no KYC step. Sub-accounts and a mobile app. details | EVM, Solana, or Cosmos wallets, or social/email login with a 2FA step; no KYC in the verified flow. US, UK, and Canada officially restricted, enforced by IP. details | Wallet-connect only — no account or deposit step; no KYC in the verified flow. Geographic access policy not verified. details | Deposit creates the account — no separate signup. Jurisdiction restrictions not stated in the docs. details 1 · details 2 |
| Collateral & deposits What funds an account, and from where. | USDC primary, from Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base, or Polygon; other assets (BTC, ETH, SOL among them) can be deposited and sold into collateral. Withdrawals to Arbitrum at a flat $1. details | Two perp families by margin asset: USDT-margined and USD1-margined contracts. details | USDC on the Noble network; deposits typically appear in about 30 seconds. details | No exchange deposit — positions open straight from the wallet; collateral token chosen per position. details | USDC base collateral — Ethereum mainnet (1 USDC minimum) or Arbitrum/Base/Avalanche via CCTP (5 USDC minimum); documented Multi-Asset Margin adds ETH at a 50% haircut (perps only, capped, Unified Trading Accounts required). details |
What this table deliberately leaves out
Each fact on this site has one home, so three dimensions are compared elsewhere rather than repeated here: what venues charge is the fee comparison; what they pay or reward — funding mechanics, vaults, points, staking, referral benefits — is the earning comparison; and what a given strategy would cost you across venues is the earning scenarios tool. For an overall pick, see the best perp DEX rankings.
Reading this honestly
A venue with more filled cells isn't automatically better — breadth is a feature, not a verdict. A trader who only wants deep BTC perp liquidity has no use for prediction markets; a trader who wants stock exposure without a brokerage cares about exactly one row here. And unique features carry unique risks: builder-deployed markets, 1001x modes, and RWA perps are all newer, thinner surfaces than the core crypto books — the per-venue pages linked from each cell carry the caveats that don't fit in a table cell.
Source pages linked from each cell carry that claim's verification date against official documentation. Venue surfaces change; if a linked page and this table ever disagree, the linked page is newer — and tell us. Some linked pages contain disclosed referral links; see our methodology.