Background

On September 18, 2025, Zhao Changpeng posted a price chart that was neither Bitcoin nor BNB.

The chart displayed the price trend of the native token of the decentralized perpetual exchange ASTER, which had just launched the day before.

"Well done! A smooth start. Let's keep it up!" he said.

Within a few hours, the ASTER token surged 400% from its issuance price. The market clearly received the signal: this former Binance CEO was not just congratulating but declaring war on Hyperliquid.

As HYPE token holders watched their Hyperliquid assets soar to a historic high of almost $60, Zhao Changpeng's carefully crafted tweet landed like a precision strike. Though banned from operating Binance, Zhao Changpeng evidently was not banned from shaking the market, as he was now fully backing Hyperliquid's strongest competitor.

However, the war machine had already been set in motion. YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs) had been silently funding ASTER's development. The BNB chainlink network was being activated. The world's largest crypto empire was mobilizing against this decentralized newcomer who dared to seize a share of the derivatives market.

This was the opening salvo of the perpetual contract decentralized exchange war, and Binance had no intention of surrendering.

(1) What Is ASTER?

ASTER was born in December 2024 from the merger of two major DeFi protocols, Astherus and APX Finance. This integration created a unified trading infrastructure aimed at directly challenging Hyperliquid's expanding market share.

(Note: Astherus focuses on yield-generating multi-asset liquidity, while APX Finance is a decentralized perpetual trading platform)

The platform is a multi-chain decentralized exchange that supports the BNB chain, Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum networks, enabling seamless trading without manual cross-chain transactions through aggregated multi-chain liquidity. Since its launch in March 2025, ASTER has processed over $514 billion in transactions for 2 million users. Following the token's issuance, the platform's total locked value briefly reached a peak of $2 billion, now standing at $655 million as of September 2025.

Unlike decentralized exchanges that only focus on spot trading, ASTER is positioned as a comprehensive trading platform that provides both spot and perpetual futures markets. While its core business is perpetual derivatives, the platform also offers spot trading functionality, with its native token ASTER/USDT being the first trading pair to be listed.

（II）How does ASTER address front-running and liquidation manipulation?

ASTER's core architecture is dedicated to solving the liquidity fragmentation challenge that plagues multi-chain DeFi. The platform builds "unified liquidity" through aggregating cross-chain order book depth, instead of requiring users to perform cross-chain asset transfers.