Original author: Scof, ChainCatcher
Original editor: TB, ChainCatcher
Over the past week, the survival status of decentralized exchanges has sparked widespread discussion.
Hyperliquids self-explosive arbitrage by a whale with 50x leverage shocked the market, and its HLP vault lost nearly $4 million after receiving the liquidation order.
On the other hand, GMGN, which was extremely prosperous during the Pump period, has also fallen into a predicament that cannot be ignored. According to Dune data, the platforms revenue has dropped from $2.34 million on January 19 to $74,000 on March 11, a plunge of nearly 97%. At the same time, the community reported that high KOL marketing expenses, user loss, and intensified competition due to the entry of CEX have further caused users to worry about the future of GMGN.
With this in mind, ChainCatcher has summarized the recent earnings of seven mainstream DEXs in this article for readers’ reference.
Quick interpretation (no ink, just look at the conclusion)
Jupiter and PancakeSwap still maintain relatively high daily returns, and their long-term returns are stable.
Hyperliquid has led in revenue in the past 24 hours, but is still significantly lower than its historical high.
The revenues of Raydium and Shadow Exchange dropped significantly, and the market activity weakened significantly.
Although Aerodrome, THENA and others have experienced severe declines, they still have certain profitability.
The following is a comparison of the revenue of several mainstream DEXs in the past 24 hours and the highest single-day revenue in history:
Note: The full text data comes from Deflama, as of March 12
Disassembling one by one to see the current situation and trends of mainstream DEX
1. Shadow Exchange
✅ Background and positioning: A centralized liquidity layer and exchange natively deployed on Sonic. Powered by the x(3, 3) incentive model, the goal is to provide an efficient and low-cost trading experience.
📉 Earnings data: historical high 864.44 K, 83 K in the past 24 hours, down 90.30%.
📊 Market performance: Ranked in the top ten cryptocurrency revenue rankings in the past 30 days, and user activity remains stable. The x(3, 3) mechanism improves the efficiency of capital utilization, and the MEV protection mechanism optimizes the trading experience. Liquidity providers and traders have considerable benefits. The Gems reward system attracts deep participation from the Sonic ecosystem, promotes the expansion of the protocol ecosystem, and shows the potential for sustained growth.
2. Raydium
✅ Background and positioning: Solana is the leading AMM DEX in the ecosystem. In the past, it has attracted a large number of users with its low fees and efficient transactions.
📉 Revenue data: The historical highest was 3.39 M, and in the past 24 hours it was only 48 K, a decrease of 98.57%, and the market activity dropped sharply. Its native token
📊 Market performance: In Q4 2024, it once accounted for 61% of SolanaDEXs trading volume, but its TVL was only 39% of Uniswap, indicating that trading was active but liquidity was relatively insufficient. At the same time, since Raydiums trading volume is highly dependent on the support of Pump.fun, it must seek to expand its layout in new non-meme fields in the future.
3. Jupiter
✅ Background and positioning: Solana is the leading DEX aggregator in the Solana ecosystem, providing the best transaction path optimization and is the core pillar of Solana DeFi transaction volume.
📉 Revenue data: historical high 3.13 M, 329 K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 89.46%, but compared with other DEXs, it still maintains a high level of activity.
📊 Market performance: As the DEX with the largest transaction volume in the Solana ecosystem, it has deep liquidity and high cross-platform integration, and low user transaction costs. However, due to the Libra incident some time ago, it was suspected of insider trading, and no further investigation results have been made yet.
4. PancakeSwap
✅ Background and positioning: As the leading DEX in the BSC ecosystem, it maintains its competitiveness with low gas fees, high-speed transactions, and multi-chain expansion (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.).
📉 Revenue data: historical high 6.4 M, 1.11 M in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 82.65%, but still maintains high profitability in the DeFi field.
📊 Market performance: Thanks to the activeness of the BSC ecosystem, PancakeSwap has a broad DeFi user base and continues to expand product features (such as NFT, staking, etc.).
5. Hyperliquid
✅ Background and positioning: Arbitrum is a decentralized derivatives trading platform that adopts an active market-making mechanism to form differentiated competition with GMX.
📉 Revenue data: historical high 4.42 M, 1.17 M in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 73.52%, but still dominates the DeFi derivatives market.
📊 Market performance: Thanks to traders attracted by high leverage trading, Hyperliquid maintains its lead in trading volume and profitability. However, due to the recent impact of the whale arbitrage incident, users have doubts about its liquidity management mechanism, resulting in some funds fleeing in a risk-averse manner.
6. Aerodrome
✅ Background and positioning: The core DEX of the Base ecosystem adopts the ve(3, 3) economic model to incentivize liquidity providers and optimize the trading experience.
📉 Revenue data: historical high 1.52 M, 290 K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 80.91%. The market liquidity has decreased but still maintains a certain level of activity.
📊 Market Performance: It occupies a dominant position in the Base ecosystem, thanks to the recent signs of recovery in the Base chain, strong market performance, continued growth in trading volume and market capitalization, and high community participation.
7. THENA
✅ Background and positioning: One of the DEXs in the BNB ecosystem, it adopts the ve(3, 3) economic model and aims to improve the sustainability of liquidity incentives.
📉 Revenue data: historical high 208.95 K, 48 K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 77.02%. Despite the decline, it still has certain competitiveness in the BSC ecosystem.
📊 Market performance: It is a second-tier DEX in the BSC ecosystem and faces strong competition from PancakeSwap, but its ve(3, 3) model can still attract some liquidity. According to the website, THENA is planning to migrate to version V3. This upgrade will introduce the Hooks function, allowing smart contracts to be deployed on specific liquidity pools to execute specific logic when users interact. This will provide support for advanced order types, complex applications, and customized requirements, further enhancing the flexibility and functionality of the protocol.
At present, decentralized exchanges as a whole are showing a trend of declining revenue, intensified competition, and structural differentiation. The revenue of mainstream platforms has generally fallen by 70%-98% from historical highs, and market activity has been significantly affected.
Jupiter and PancakeSwap are still the leaders, with high daily returns and relatively stable long-term performance, relying on ecological layout and user base to maintain competitiveness. Hyperliquid still occupies a place in the derivatives market, but the whale arbitrage incident has caused market concerns about its risk control capabilities, and its liquidity has been impacted. Raydium and Shadow Exchange have seen a significant decline in revenue, the former due to the decline in Pump.funs trading volume, and the latter due to the weakening of overall market activity. Aerodrome and THENA still have certain profitability, but are facing the squeeze of stronger competitors in their respective ecosystems.
Looking ahead, DEX still needs to face three core issues:
How to maintain trading activity - as the market cools down and users willingness to trade decreases, how can DEX improve user stickiness?
How to optimize liquidity management - with whale arbitrage and intensified competition in CEX, how can platforms build a more stable liquidity system in the DeFi field?
How to achieve sustainable income - In a bear market cycle, the high fee model is difficult to sustain in the long term. Does DEX need a new profit model?
In the face of industry challenges, the way for DEX to survive in the future may no longer be just about trading volume, but about liquidity, risk control mechanisms and ecological layout.
