The blockchain industry has seen great innovation across various sectors, from finance and gaming to even physical infrastructure (dePIN). However, many of these innovations have yet to gain traction. The areas seeing the most success are primarily centered around finance, particularly trading.

At Zaros, we’re fully embracing the future of DeFi. We’re bringing the proven concept of perpetual futures—a product with clear market fit —into the decentralized world. Currently, 94.1% of perpetual futures trading volume comes from centralized exchanges, and recent history has shown the risks of relying on centralized systems.

This shift presents a huge opportunity. Decentralized platforms are rapidly improving, with user experiences becoming nearly indistinguishable from CEXs. Soon, users will be interacting with decentralized applications seamlessly, with the added security and transparency that come with decentralization.

In this article, we’ll show you why perpetual DEXs are ready for significant growth and why Monad needs a high-performance perp DEX in its ecosystem. That’s exactly what we’re building at Zaros.

Let’s get to it!

Perpetual Futures: The Opportunity of a Lifetime

Let’s start by looking at the impressive numbers that perpetual futures are generating in the crypto industry. Since January 2023, BTC futures have reached a total trading volume of $24.47 trillion, averaging $1.23 trillion per month—a massive figure, especially considering this is just for Bitcoin.

If you’re new to perpetual futures, we recommend reading our FREE e-book: The Zaros Complete Guide to Perpetual Futures Trading for a deeper understanding.

Perpetual futures have clearly achieved product-market fit (PMF), with both retail and institutions trading them daily. However, 94.1% of this volume still comes from centralized exchanges, indicating a growth opportunity for perpetual DEXs over the coming years.

While 94.1% is indeed a big number, DEXs are steadily gaining market share. In January 2023, perpetual DEXs held just 2.1% of the market. By August 26, 2024, that share had risen to 5.9%, more than doubling within this period.

Following incidents like the collapse of FTX, many users have shifted toward decentralized protocols. With innovations like account abstraction, DEXs are rapidly approaching a CEX-like experience, while offering the added security and transparency of decentralization. The gap is closing, and the future of decentralized trading looks brighter by the day.

Perps on Monad

As mentioned earlier, perpetual futures generate trillions in monthly trading volume, and while DEXs still trail behind CEXs, they are quickly gaining momentum.

The trend is clear: more users are turning to DEXs every day, and the future looks promising. Every blockchain ecosystem benefits from having a high-performing perpetual DEX, and we’re bringing that to Monad—a network with an incredibly engaged community even before its official launch. The "nads" can’t wait to start trading perps natively on Monad.

Since January 2023, perpetual DEXs have processed $1.8 trillion in trades, averaging $90 billion per month. Who wouldn’t want such a cash-cow in the ecosystem?

Beyond these promising figures, Monad itself has the potential to be a game-changer for the industry. With its parallelization capabilities, Monad offers massive scalability, making it possible to develop complex DeFi applications on-chain.

As we mentioned in our previous article on Monad, where we explored the network from a technical perspective, here are a few possibilities we envision for the chain:

• A Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) for spot markets, utilizing Monad’s parallelized EVM.

• Bribe mechanisms to incentivize liquidity provision.

• High-frequency trading capabilities.

Our vision is to establish Zaros as the leading derivatives platform on Monad. Having already built our protocol on Arbitrum, an EVM-compatible network, transitioning to Monad will be easy. We’ll be ready on day one, and we look forward to seeing the Monad community trading perps on Zaros!

zPoints Pre-Season on Monad

One of the most exciting updates we can share with the community is that we’ll be hosting a zPoints pre-season on Monad. Once Monad goes live, we’ll be ready, and users will have the opportunity to accumulate zPoints by trading on the network.

And it gets even better. By engaging with Monad from day one through Zaros, you might increase your chances of qualifying for a potential future Monad airdrop—yes, the highly anticipated blockchain that has already raised $244M. (While there’s no official confirmation about an airdrop or its criteria, historically, interacting with a blockchain has often been a key factor in airdrop eligibility.)

Final Notes

The blockchain space is evolving rapidly, and perpetual futures are proving to be a key part of this growth. While most of the trading still happens on centralized exchanges, perp DEXs are steadily gaining ground.

At Zaros, we see this shift as a major opportunity. By building a perpetual DEX on Monad, we’re not only meeting the rising demand for decentralized trading but also taking advantage of Monad’s advanced infrastructure for enhanced scalability and performance.

To keep up with the latest updates on Zaros, be sure to follow us on Twitter/X and join our Discord community. You definitely don’t want to miss our upcoming launch on Monad!

About Zaros

Zaros is the first LRTFi perpetuals DEX powered by a CEX-like UX coming to Arbitrum & Monad. It enables boosting ETH staking & restaking yield by delegating liquidity to the protocol's ZLP Vaults, while traders on the other side may leverage up to 100x across crypto, FX, and commodities perpetuals.

The recent funding round saw participation from prominent venture funds, including SNZ Holdings, Seven Capital, Cogitent Ventures, and DCI Capital. Angel investors such as Antony Sassano, Fernando Martinelli, Kieran Warwick, Andy Chen, and Kevin Lu also contributed, underscoring the strong confidence in Zaros' potential.