Perp DEXs - The Financial Supercenters of the Internet Economy

From Wall Street to On-Chain Supercenters

Financial supercenters already exist in the physical world. Think WallSt/NYC, London, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These places are magnets for capital and talent because they centralize liquidity, information, and access.

Now zoom out. In the on-chain world, the equivalent is the perp DEX. Each perp DEX is one of several superclusters of liquidity that will exist on-chain in the future. These will be the beating hearts of the global digital economy.

‍

Who Will Access Them?

Commercial businesses, whether they are apps, appchains, or entire DAOs, will access these hubs to:

- issue tokens
- invest cash into yield-bearing strategies
- borrow and lend against their assets
- hedge risks just like corporates do today with futures and swaps
- borrow and lend against their assets

At the same time, speculators and arbitrageurs will continuously interact with these markets, compressing spreads, creating efficiency, and deepening liquidity.

‍

‍

The attractiveness of one supercenter over another will come down to the "costs" of accessing liquidity:

1) price (fees, spreads, slippage, cost of capital)
2) size + immediacy (how much size can be executed without moving the market)
3) risk of information slippage
4) ease of access (execution complexity, onboarding)

The winners will be the superclusters that provide the most choice while reducing these costs.

‍

TAM: You Are Not Bullish Enough

‍

When I say the TAM here is large, I don’t mean a 10x. I mean orders of magnitude larger. Think about it this way: the TAM for perp DEXs is equal to the TAM of all financial businesses combined:

- brokerages like Robinhood, Schwab, IBKR
- exchanges like CME, ICE, Nasdaq
- asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard
- banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs
- clearinghouses and settlement systems like DTCC

A perp DEX combines all of the above and makes them seamlessly composable. It’s the single point of convergence point for entire financial stack.

‍

Why Valuations Will Go Parabolic

The market is still wildly mispricing what perp DEXs represent imo. Liquidity has powerful, reflexive network effects. Once a venue becomes the deepest and cheapest hub, it becomes a black hole for liquidity with intense gravity. Composability amplifies this further as it  expands the surface area for activity. These supercenters are permissionless by design with global access and no bottlenecks. Anyone with a wallet can participate. No CEX or Tradfi institution can match this direct-access, structural advantage. Finally as native L1/L2 yield is unlocked (via bridge lending and censorship-resistant, yield bearing stables) and achieve scale, it increases the costs to move those dollars to other venues.  In that context, today’s “billions” valuations are nothing but rounding errors, these entities are playing for TRILLIONS.

So when I say you’re not bullish enough, I mean it literally.

Perp DEXs aren’t just the next Robinhood or Binance. They are the next Wall Street, CME, Goldman, DTCC and the next BlackRock — combined, composable, borderless, and native to the internet. We are still early but the direction is clear: the future of finance isn’t scattered across silos. It’s concentrated in a handful of on-chain supercenters.

And those supercenters are perp DEXs.

Paradexio