237,000 users, points farmed over ten months, less than 11 months of mainnet operation, and still it couldn't withstand the industry's wave of shutdowns.
On October 15, StandX announced on X that it would not issue a platform token, instead opting for a one-time airdrop of DUSD and gradually winding down the project. Counting from its mainnet launch on November 24, 2025, this perpetual contract DEX founded by core members of Binance's futures team and regarded by the community as "the next Aster" lived for less than 11 months.
The Most Profitable Sector
According to StandX's announcement, the project served over 237,000 users since its mainnet launch in November 2025, with peak TVL exceeding $200 million, and no fund security incidents occurred during operation. Most of its previous revenue had already been returned to users through SIP-2 and SIP-3, and this airdrop will use all remaining project revenue, with the team adding additional funds. The official statement acknowledged that not issuing a token might disappoint some users, but believes this is the right decision for the community.
"Getting counter-farmed" is currently the dominant sentiment in the community, but thinking about it, the project team's approach seems reasonable. After all, compared to the price trajectories of most projects we've seen, cutting losses in time isn't a bad thing.
In the crypto industry, trading platforms have always been the most profitable layer. So in this wave of crypto bankruptcies from 2025 to 2026, StandX is indeed a representative case. As the sector widely recognized as the most profitable in the industry, no one would think trading platforms don't make money, yet they actually chose to shut down without even issuing a token — that's unexpected.
Actually, thinking about it, the team not forcing out a token to make one last cut — in today's industry, that already counts as a very dignified exit.
The project shutdown is most likely because there's no money left. Let's look at StandX's revenue situation.
Trading Volume in the First Three Months After Launch
According to DeFiLlama's monthly perpetual trading data (in units of $100 million), here's how StandX and two benchmark projects have trended since launch. Hyperliquid's series includes HIP-3 deployed markets, and Aster's figures are taken after V3 launched on September 17, 2025, with earlier volume belonging to its predecessor project.
StandX's first full month was December 2025, with $1.85 billion in volume. During the same period, Aster did $177.47 billion and Hyperliquid did $169.31 billion, meaning StandX was only about 1% of those two. Three months later, in February 2026, it reached $17.11 billion, rising to 8.5% of Hyperliquid, though in absolute terms it was still just a rounding error. Its peak came in June 2026 at $24.91 billion, while Hyperliquid did $250.53 billion in the same period, roughly ten times its size.
Aster's V3 launched on September 17, 2025, and the three full months that followed, October through December, saw volumes of $259.89 billion, $259.15 billion, and $177.47 billion, respectively. In its own first month after launch, Aster was 140 times StandX. Hyperliquid is still steadily around $200 billion per month.
So StandX's volume never took off. Add fees on top of that: Hyperliquid did $209.53 billion in volume over the past 30 days and collected $88.52 million in fees, an effective rate of about 4.2 basis points. StandX did $11.05 billion over the past 30 days, which at 2 basis points comes to only $2.2 million. Its volume is one-nineteenth of the other's, its fee rate is about half, and its revenue is one-fortieth.
Compared with Aster, Aster's effective fee rate is only 0.9 basis points, even lower than StandX's, but its trading volume is nearly five times StandX's, and its fee revenue of $5.08 million is still more than double StandX's estimated figure. In a business that only cares about scale, the fee rate is never decisive. Scale is.
A fee stream that has already been sent out
StandX's cumulative perpetual volume is about $145 billion, roughly $11 billion over the past 30 days, and about $130 million in 24 hours. Using a blended rough estimate of 1.5 to 2.5 basis points, cumulative gross fees come to roughly $22 million to $36.5 million. That money has to be deducted in three places first: SIP-2 distributes fees to position-holding users, SIP-3 channels net fees into the DUSD yield pool, and SIP-5A routes fees back as market-making rewards, plus referral and affiliate rebates.
So what is left for the team itself may not be much. KOL @Sea_Bitcoin said that after communicating with the project team, the team did indeed say it is losing money.
To be fair, StandX isn't failing to generate revenue. At $11 billion in monthly volume and a blended 2 basis points, it brings in roughly $2.2 million in gross fees per month, or about $26 million annualized — on par with Pacifica and Lighter. But that money was then paid back out through SIP-2, SIP-3, SIP-5A, and referrals. Buying volume with revenue is the standard playbook for perp DEXs this cycle; the difference is that others bought retention and open interest, while StandX's volume never stuck.
$11 billion in monthly volume, only about $14 million in open interest, and TVL down from a peak of over $200 million to roughly $22 million.
That's why no token has been issued. The market hasn't cared about TVL, volume, or user counts for years now — it asks one question: how much revenue do you make, and where does the money ultimately land?
A Binance Futures Pedigree, Ten Months
StandX's team lineup is one of the most impressive among perp teams this cycle.
· Aaron Gong (AG), CEO, former head of Binance Futures, who helped take Binance Futures from zero to scale, and previously spent nearly a decade at a Chicago-based commodity futures platform.
· Justin Cheng, co-founder, former head of growth at Binance Futures.
· Other core members come from Goldman Sachs' trading systems and liquidity engine team, and Amber Group's on-chain trading team.
The team is composed of Binance Futures founding members and Goldman Sachs alumni, fully self-funded with no external investment. With this lineup, it reached roughly $700 million in daily volume.
Aster's token price surge — also Binance-affiliated — pushed those who missed it to turn their attention to StandX, treating it as the same play before the train leaves the station. Zooming out further, the benchmark is Hyperliquid.
What Fell Was All Trading Platforms
Over the past year, StandX wasn't the only trading platform to go down.
Start with the HIP-3 deployers in the Hyperliquid ecosystem — they most resemble StandX. HIP-3 allows builders to stake 500,000 HYPE, about $40 million, locked for at least 183 days, and then launch their own perp DEX. Historically, 10 perp DEXs have registered under HIP-3; 5 have ceased trading and 1 never launched. For deployers outside the top tier, cumulative lifetime deployer revenue totals just $747,000, while the HYPE they staked for the privilege is worth about $167 million. That same money sitting in passive staking would yield about $3.67 million a year.
The first to officially shut down was Felix, announced on June 8, with all markets closing as of June 19. It had cumulative trading volume of about $3 billion and lost out to trade.xyz in the same ecosystem. On June 15, Ventuals announced it was winding down. It had raised 500,000 HYPE tokens and about $6.5 billion in trading volume, but died because pre-IPO perpetual contracts had no convergence anchor, with annualized funding rates once spiking to about 8,700%, blowing up longs outright. At the end of June, dreamcash, which had received investment from Tether, settled its CASH perpetual market. Its historical trading volume was $19.5 billion. At the end of August, HyENA, which used USDe as margin, delisted all 25 markets. Lifetime deployer revenue was $33,400, while buying the asset slot alone cost about $880,000.
The same was true outside the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Satori Finance, led by Polychain with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Jump Crypto, announced its shutdown in June and went offline on July 16. It had processed cumulative perpetual trading volume of $134 billion, and before shutdown its locked value had fallen to only about $1.2 million, with annualized fees of about $3 million. The team said revenue could no longer support the business. Flash Trade on Solana announced in August that it would gradually wind down operations after failing to find a buyer. On June 29, Loopring, the first zkRollup project, simply shut down its own DEX. On July 25, Dango, a perpetual trading platform with its own Layer 1 public chain, announced it was ceasing operations, stopped trading on July 29, and shut down its chain on August 13.
The wave of shutdowns will certainly continue, and this will definitely not be the last project to announce its exit this year. But an exit this graceful is truly rare. Times are tough in the industry, and I hope all project teams planning to exit can shake hands and say goodbye with relative dignity.
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