The Rise of Perpetual DEXs: How On-Chain Derivatives Became Crypto’s Top Market?

In the last two years, perpetual decentralized exchanges—widely known as perpetual DEXs—have emerged as the most dynamic and rapidly expanding segment of the crypto trading landscape. As centralized exchanges face increasing regulatory scrutiny, operational failures, and liquidity fragmentation, traders have shifted toward on-chain derivatives platforms that offer non-custodial trading with leverage, transparency, and 24/7 liquidity. By 2025, perpetual DEXs accounted for a rapidly growing share of derivatives volume, outpacing the growth rates of both spot DEXs and even several major centralized derivatives platforms. What started as an experimental niche built on early designs like perpetual futures on BitMEX has evolved into a global on-chain economy powered by liquidity pools, oracle frameworks, risk engines, and multi-chain interoperability.

The shift is not accidental—it reflects a deeper transformation in user expectations and market structure. Traders increasingly want the benefits of leverage without the vulnerabilities of centralized custody. At the same time, liquidity providers are drawn to yield opportunities generated through funding rates and market-making models that do not require them to actively manage positions. Startups view perpetual DEXs as a new frontier, where they can build their own branded trading ecosystem without the massive overhead and legal complexity of centralized platforms. The result is a convergence of innovation, user demand, and industry momentum that has pushed perpetual DEXs to the forefront of the crypto derivatives sector.

Understanding why perpetual DEX development is trending requires examining the structural advantages they provide, the evolution of DeFi infrastructure, and the shifting psychology of traders who no longer see decentralization as an ideological preference but as a functional necessity. This article explores how these forces came together and how perpetual DEXs became the top-performing market category in the entire on-chain economy.

The Concept of Perpetual DEXs – What They Are and Why They Matter

Perpetual DEXs are decentralized trading platforms that offer perpetual futures—derivative contracts without an expiration date—allowing traders to take long or short positions with leverage. Unlike traditional futures, which expire on a specific date, perpetual futures continuously track the underlying asset’s price through a funding rate mechanism. This mechanism aligns the perpetual contract price with the spot market by incentivizing traders to balance the direction of open interest.

The innovation lies not only in the contract design but in the infrastructure that supports it. Perpetual DEXs combine liquidity pools, automated market makers (AMMs), oracle systems, and risk-based engines to generate synthetic leveraged exposure without relying on centralized market makers. Smart contracts manage margin, liquidation, leverage risk, price feeds, and collateral, reducing the need for intermediaries. This model democratizes access, enabling any user to trade, provide liquidity, or build on top of the protocol without gatekeepers.

The importance of perpetual DEXs stems from the problems they solve in both trading experience and market integrity. Centralized exchanges historically dominated derivatives trading because they offered deep liquidity, smooth execution, and advanced leverage features. But they also introduced custodial risk—a single point of failure highlighted by exchange collapses, frozen withdrawals, mismanaged balance sheets, and opaque internal controls. Perpetual DEXs flip this model. Traders retain full custody of their assets until the moment trades occur, and all processes run on publicly auditable smart contracts. This removes hidden leverage, shadow order books, and internal manipulation risks that surfaced in large centralized failures.

The timing of their rise is also significant. The broader crypto environment has shifted toward transparency, composability, and self-custody. As users grow more sophisticated, they are seeking platforms that combine the efficiency of traditional derivatives with the security of blockchain rails. Perpetual DEXs deliver exactly that: a trading environment with leverage, round-the-clock access, automated liquidity, and on-chain verifiability. In many ways, they represent the first truly native financial primitive of DeFi—an instrument designed from the ground up for decentralized markets rather than adapted from TradFi models.

Why Perpetual DEXs Are Trending – The Core Market Drivers

The rise of perpetual DEXs is driven by a combination of structural advantages, user demand shifts, and technological breakthroughs that have aligned at precisely the right time. What makes these platforms trend is not a single feature but the way their architecture addresses long-standing issues in both centralized and decentralized trading ecosystems. Several key drivers have fueled their acceleration into mainstream adoption.

The first and perhaps most influential driver is the global movement toward self-custody and verifiable transparency. After major centralized exchange failures, traders no longer accept opaque balance sheets or off-chain liabilities as part of the trading experience. Perpetual DEXs provide cryptographic proof of reserves, automated liquidation processes, and fully auditable transaction flows. This gives users the confidence that positions are managed openly and that no entity can misrepresent collateral or manipulate internal risk systems.

Another major driver is the evolution of DeFi infrastructure itself. In 2020 and 2021, decentralized exchanges struggled with liquidity fragmentation, slow execution, and high gas fees, particularly on Ethereum. But with the arrival of Layer-2 ecosystems, modular blockchains, and high-speed networks like Solana, Arbitrum, and Polygon, decentralized trading has become faster, cheaper, and more efficient. This infrastructure upgrade is essential for perpetual markets, where execution speed, funding rate calculations, and liquidations must operate with minimal latency. Today’s networks enable perpetual DEXs to match the responsiveness of centralized platforms, removing the last major barrier to adoption.

A third catalyst is the innovation in liquidity models. Early AMMs were not suited for leveraged products, but new hybrid market-making systems—such as virtual AMMs (vAMMs), synthetic liquidity pools, and dynamic risk engines—created conditions where liquidity providers could earn sustainable returns without active market making. This opened perpetual DEX participation to a wider audience, from everyday DeFi users to professional LPs seeking yield uncorrelated with traditional farming.

Finally, cultural and behavioral shifts among traders have played a significant role. The appetite for derivatives has grown significantly, with perpetual contracts becoming the default instrument for active traders who want to speculate or hedge positions. Retail traders also prefer perpetuals because they are easier to understand than monthly futures or options. The most telling evidence is that perpetual futures generate more trading volume globally than spot markets on many days. When traders realized they could access this instrument directly on-chain—with no account creation, no withdrawal limits, no regional restrictions, and no custodial risk—the adoption curve accelerated rapidly.

Together, these drivers have transformed perpetual DEXs from experimental platforms into the preferred environment for high-volume, leverage-enabled trading. They meet user demand for speed, autonomy, liquidity, and transparency, all while aligning with regulatory trends pushing toward non-custodial solutions.

Market Growth and Data – Understanding the Scale of Expansion

The growth trajectory of perpetual DEXs reflects one of the most dramatic shifts in trading behavior within the crypto ecosystem. In just a few years, these platforms moved from handling a niche subset of derivatives volume to becoming major liquidity hubs capable of supporting billions in daily open interest. Their rise is not only rapid but structurally significant, signaling that the crypto market is evolving toward decentralized, risk-minimized trading.

Perpetual DEXs benefited from a broader market transition where traders began prioritizing safety and execution guarantees over convenience. After multiple centralized exchange disruptions, the industry saw an influx of traders migrating to trustless platforms that ensured verifiable collateral management. This behavioral shift, combined with the growing sophistication of DeFi protocols, created fertile ground for perpetual DEXs to scale beyond expectations.

Data trends highlight this growth. In multiple periods throughout 2024 and early 2025, several perpetual DEXs consistently reported rising total value locked (TVL), increased open interest, and deeper liquidity pools. As decentralized derivatives platforms refined their risk engines and adapted to new liquidity models, trader confidence surged. Participation from liquidity providers also increased as yield opportunities became more predictable and less correlated with traditional liquidity mining schemes.

Another factor supporting growth is cross-chain expansion. Perpetual DEXs no longer rely on single-chain liquidity. Many leading platforms deployed on multiple Layer-2 networks or implemented interoperability layers that allow unified liquidity across ecosystems. This ensures lower slippage and high execution quality, even during volatile market conditions. The multi-chain approach also broadened their user base, attracting traders from ecosystems like Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Avalanche, and emerging rollup environments.

The scale of adoption is further reinforced by integrations with wallets, aggregators, and analytics platforms. Traders can now access perpetual swaps directly from mobile wallets, smart contract wallets, or trading dashboards that route liquidity across multiple DEXs. These UX improvements make perpetual DEXs feel more like sophisticated trading terminals rather than raw DeFi interfaces—an evolution that significantly widens mainstream appeal.

Institutional interest has also played a role. While institutions remain cautious about regulatory interpretation, many fund managers now view decentralized derivatives platforms as an inevitable part of the future market structure. Their teams study these platforms for potential liquidity provisioning, arbitrage strategies, or data analytics use cases. This growing awareness contributes indirectly to adoption by reinforcing the idea that perpetual DEXs are not fringe experiments but long-term financial primitives.

Market growth, therefore, is not a single storyline—it is a convergence of liquidity, technology, user behavior, and narrative momentum. The rise of perpetual DEXs reflects a maturing market that now values transparency, execution reliability, and on-chain risk management as core requirements rather than optional benefits.

Case Studies – Leading Perpetual DEXs and Their Impact on the Market

The rise of perpetual DEXs is best understood by examining the platforms that reshaped trader behavior and introduced new models of on-chain liquidity. Several leading protocols have played defining roles in transforming perpetuals from experimental instruments into the backbone of decentralized derivatives trading. Each platform contributed a unique innovation—whether in liquidity modeling, execution architecture, or risk management—that collectively elevated the standard for the entire sector.

GMX was among the first to showcase the viability of on-chain perpetuals at scale. Built initially on Arbitrum and later expanding to Avalanche, GMX introduced a liquidity pool model that allowed traders to open large positions with minimal slippage. Its GLP pool became a core innovation, functioning as a counterparty asset basket that absorbed trader profits and losses. This model attracted liquidity providers by offering yield from funding fees, liquidation fees, and trading activity, giving DeFi users a passive way to benefit from derivatives volume without managing active positions. GMX’s transparent, oracle-based pricing and efficient liquidation systems won over traders who wanted predictable, low-cost execution.

dYdX demonstrated the potential of a hybrid approach that combines an order book architecture with decentralized settlement. While previous DEXs relied heavily on AMMs, dYdX showed that an order-book-driven model could still thrive in a decentralized setting by offloading matching to a high-speed chain while maintaining non-custodial guarantees. As trading volume surged, dYdX became synonymous with professional-grade on-chain derivatives, attracting institutional traders, market-neutral funds, and experienced retail users. Its introduction of multi-asset collateral, advanced risk systems, and sophisticated funding mechanics set standards that many newer platforms adopted.

Perpetual Protocol pioneered vAMM (virtual automated market maker) models that removed the need for real liquidity within the pool while still enabling traders to open leveraged long and short positions. This gave rise to synthetic liquidity systems where the liquidity requirement was significantly lower than traditional AMMs. The vAMM architecture served as a template for later protocols that used virtual pricing, synthetic liquidity, or hybrid AMM-order book structures to optimize execution.

On the high-performance end of the ecosystem, Drift Protocol and Zeta Markets on Solana showed how ultra-low latency networks enable perpetual DEXs to compete with centralized exchanges on pure speed. These platforms leverage Solana’s throughput, allowing real-time risk recalibration, lightning-fast order matching, and minimal liquidation lag. This level of performance attracted traders previously hesitant to move from CEXs due to latency concerns, validating the thesis that blockchain execution need not be slow.

Meanwhile, Hyperliquid, a community-built chain designed exclusively for high-frequency derivatives trading, introduced a vertically integrated approach where the entire stack—from matching to settlement—is optimized for perpetuals. Its consistent growth demonstrated a critical insight: traders value environments purpose-built for derivatives rather than general-purpose DeFi chains.

Across all these examples, a clear pattern emerges: innovation drives liquidity, liquidity drives traders, and traders drive market leadership. These platforms collectively prove that perpetual DEXs are not limited by older DeFi constraints—they are evolving into sophisticated, high-performance trading ecosystems redefining what decentralized markets can achieve.

Why Traders Prefer Perpetual DEXs – Understanding the Shift in User Behavior?

The increasing preference for perpetual DEXs is rooted in changing trader psychology and an environment where transparency, fairness, and accessibility have become non-negotiable. Traders today expect more than just leverage—they expect systems that treat every user equally, remove unnecessary intermediaries, and guarantee that their collateral is never mismanaged.

One of the strongest behavioral drivers is full asset control. Self-custody has transformed from a philosophical ideal into a practical requirement after high-profile exchange failures. On perpetual DEXs, traders hold collateral in their wallets until trades are executed, meaning the platform cannot freeze funds, halt withdrawals, or manipulate balances. This simple yet powerful design shift restores trust in the trading process, particularly for users who previously suffered losses from compromised centralized platforms.

Another factor is algorithmic fairness. Smart contracts enforce margin rules, liquidation thresholds, and risk checks without discretion. Unlike centralized systems that may alter liquidation practices or fund insurance models behind closed doors, perpetual DEXs operate in a fully transparent environment. Traders can audit the liquidation logic, verify funding rate calculations, and assess systemic risk directly from the contract code and data. For professional traders, this transparency reduces uncertainty and enables more accurate risk modeling.

Traders also appreciate the global and permissionless nature of perpetual DEXs. There are no account registrations, no KYC delays, and no regional restrictions. A trader in any part of the world can access on-chain perpetuals with a wallet, collateral, and network fees. This open access expands market participation and makes derivatives trading more inclusive compared to centralized platforms, which often restrict access by geography or enforce strict onboarding procedures.

The composability of DeFi further enhances the appeal. Positions on perpetual DEXs can be integrated into other smart contracts, used as collateral in lending protocols, automated through bots, or aggregated through portfolio dashboards. Traders who previously relied on multiple platforms for hedging, borrowing, and yield generation can now integrate these functions directly into a single on-chain strategy. This interconnectedness reduces friction and elevates the entire trading experience.

Cost efficiency also plays a major role. Funding fees, trading fees, and borrowing costs on perpetual DEXs are often lower than on centralized platforms due to automated liquidity and reduced overhead. With competition among DEXs intensifying, many protocols optimize fee structures aggressively to attract volume. Combined with the reduced slippage enabled by advanced liquidity models, traders often find that on-chain perpetuals provide superior execution for both large and small positions.

Lastly, traders value the alignment of incentives between the platform and its community. Liquidity providers, token holders, and traders all contribute to the growth and stability of the protocol. Governance models often give users the ability to vote on listing decisions, funding rate parameters, reward distribution, or protocol upgrades. This level of community integration fosters loyalty and long-term engagement that centralized platforms struggle to replicate.

The shift toward perpetual DEXs is not just a technological migration—it is a psychological and economic transition. Traders now choose platforms that offer autonomy, verifiability, and fairness, all qualities that perpetual DEXs provide by default through their smart contract infrastructure.

Liquidity Models, Risk Engines, and How Perpetual DEXs Actually Work

To understand why perpetual DEXs have become crypto’s top market, it’s important to look under the hood at how these systems function. The architecture powering on-chain perpetuals is a blend of liquidity engineering, oracle frameworks, margin mechanics, and risk algorithms—all designed to replicate the core features of centralized derivatives exchanges while maintaining decentralization, transparency, and user control.

At the heart of every perpetual DEX lies the liquidity model, which determines how trades are executed, how positions are opened, and how leverage is applied. Early perpetual DEXs used Automated Market Makers (AMMs), but these were not ideal due to the need for deep liquidity and accurate price alignment. To solve this, new liquidity models emerged. Virtual AMMs (vAMMs) introduced synthetic liquidity that removed dependency on real pool depth while still enabling predictable pricing curves. This approach lowered capital requirements and allowed platforms to scale faster. Later architectures like GLP-style aggregated liquidity pools further decentralized counterparty risk by allowing liquidity providers to collectively back trader positions.

Synthetic liquidity is one of the defining innovations. Instead of requiring millions of dollars in capital to support leveraged trades, protocols create virtual liquidity that mirrors real-world market conditions using oracle pricing and dynamic funding rates. Traders benefit from lower slippage and deeper execution capability, while liquidity providers gain access to more stable yield sources derived from protocol activity.

Another core component is the risk engine, which manages leverage, collateral, and liquidation events. Centralized exchanges handle these processes internally, often with opaque thresholds and hidden risk models. Perpetual DEXs bring this infrastructure on-chain through deterministic algorithms. Smart contracts calculate margin requirements, update collateral values, determine liquidation levels, and execute liquidations automatically. This ensures fairness and eliminates the possibility of human interference or behind-the-scenes manipulation.

Oracles play a critical role in the equation. Accurate price feeds are essential for leveraged trading because they determine liquidation points, funding payments, and position valuation. Modern perpetual DEXs rely on decentralized oracle networks rather than a single source, reducing the risk of manipulation or price spikes. Some platforms combine time-weighted averages, multi-exchange aggregation, and cross-chain validation to ensure price integrity.

Funding rates are another essential mechanism. They keep perpetual contract prices aligned with the spot market by incentivizing traders to take the opposite side of overcrowded positions. When long exposure outweighs short exposure, longs pay funding to shorts; when shorts dominate, the opposite occurs. This market-driven balancing mechanism has been central to the success of perpetual futures since their invention and remains equally crucial in decentralized versions.

Finally, the execution layer determines how trades are matched. Some perpetual DEXs use order books, providing precision and professional-grade execution. Others use AMM hybrids that enable instant settlement with low slippage. The most advanced models combine on-chain settlement with off-chain matching for speed while still ensuring non-custodial execution.

Together, these components—liquidity, pricing, leverage, and risk—form the backbone of perpetual DEX infrastructure. Their cohesion demonstrates why these platforms are trending: they offer the sophistication of centralized trading systems with the trustless guarantees and transparency of blockchain technology.

Challenges Ahead and What the Future of On-Chain Derivatives Looks Like

Despite the impressive rise of perpetual DEXs, the market is not without its challenges. These platforms have achieved rapid adoption, but their evolution must address several structural and operational hurdles to maintain long-term leadership in the derivatives sector. Understanding these challenges provides insight into what the next phase of perpetual DEX innovation will likely look like.

The first major challenge is liquidity fragmentation. While multi-chain expansion increases accessibility, it also spreads liquidity across different networks. Ensuring unified execution, consistent funding rates, and synchronized risk parameters across chains is complex. Protocols must develop advanced cross-chain messaging systems to unify liquidity without compromising decentralization or security.

The second challenge is oracle reliability. Oracles remain a single point of systemic risk, even when decentralized. Price latency or oracle manipulation can trigger mass liquidations, distort funding rates, or misvalue collateral. As perpetual DEXs scale, oracle systems must evolve to incorporate more robust safeguards, including multi-source aggregation, validation networks, and fallback mechanisms.

Another challenge is regulatory uncertainty. Perpetual futures are inherently leveraged, making them subject to strict oversight in traditional financial markets. As regulators worldwide evaluate how on-chain derivatives fit within existing frameworks, perpetual DEXs may face compliance requirements that influence their design. The future will likely see hybrid compliance models where protocols offer optional KYC modes, region-specific access controls, or on-chain attestations that align with evolving regulations.

Latency is another area of improvement. While Layer-2s and high-performance chains have significantly improved execution speed, they still cannot match the microsecond latency of traditional high-frequency trading systems. Although most crypto traders do not require ultra-low latency, institutional participants may hesitate without further improvements.

Risk scalability presents an additional concern. As trading volumes increase, risk engines must scale proportionally to handle liquidation storms, volatility spikes, and cascading failures. Traditional finance uses sophisticated real-time risk models; perpetual DEXs are catching up but must continually upgrade their algorithms to ensure systemic stability.

Despite these challenges, the future of on-chain derivatives is promising. The next generation of perpetual DEXs will likely incorporate features such as:

• Unified cross-chain liquidity and settlement
• AI-powered risk orchestration
• More flexible margin options, including multi-asset collateral
• Real-world asset (RWA) perpetuals
• Social trading and automated strategy vaults
• Institutional-grade trading layers built on L2 or app-specific chains

The broader trend is clear: perpetual DEXs are not a temporary phase but a permanent financial primitive shaping crypto’s long-term evolution. As infrastructure improves and global markets seek transparency and fairness, on-chain derivatives are positioned to outgrow many traditional models. Perpetual DEXs represent a future where traders control their assets, risk is managed algorithmically, and markets operate without centralized gatekeepers.

The Broader Impact on the Crypto Ecosystem

The rise of perpetual DEXs has had far-reaching implications beyond derivatives trading. Their growth has shaped liquidity flows, project design strategies, user expectations, and even regulatory approaches within the broader crypto ecosystem. Understanding this ripple effect is crucial for recognizing why perpetual DEXs are more than just a trend—they are a foundational shift in how decentralized markets function and evolve.

One of the most significant impacts is on liquidity distribution. Perpetual DEXs attract deep, sticky liquidity from both retail users and sophisticated liquidity providers. Unlike yield farms that encourage short-term liquidity mining, perpetual DEX models generate more sustainable rewards through trading fees, funding payments, and liquidation proceeds. As LPs allocate more capital to perpetual platforms, liquidity in these markets strengthens, indirectly supporting the broader DeFi ecosystem. Healthy liquidity in perpetual swaps often correlates with increased activity on spot DEXs, lending protocols, and staking ecosystems, creating a positive network effect across multiple layers of decentralized finance.

Another important impact is evolving user expectations. Traders who become accustomed to transparent liquidation rules, open-source risk engines, and self-custodied collateral start expecting the same standards from other financial applications. This rising expectation pushes DeFi protocols—and even some centralized services—to adopt more transparent designs. The perpetual DEX model has become a benchmark that other protocols reference when enhancing their own systems for fairness, accountability, and user protection.

The rise of perpetual DEXs has also accelerated innovation in DeFi composability. Strategies that were once limited to single platforms can now integrate perpetual positions with lending, governance, yield aggregation, and structured product protocols. For example, a trader can use an on-chain perpetual position as part of a hedging strategy in a lending protocol or feed perpetual market data into automated rebalancing bots. This interconnectedness allows for the creation of sophisticated trading strategies previously accessible only through centralized platforms or institutional desks.

Perpetual DEXs have also given developers new incentives to build app-specific chains, middleware, or modular rollups optimized for derivatives trading. These ecosystems prioritize speed, deterministic execution, and high-throughput settlement—capabilities that benefit the broader DeFi market as well. As more perpetual DEXs adopt specialized chains or next-generation rollups, other applications can piggyback on this infrastructure to deliver higher-performance DeFi solutions. This technological advancement lifts the entire industry, driving the shift toward more scalable, customizable execution environments.

The regulatory landscape is also evolving due to the success of perpetual DEXs. As regulators observe the migration of trading volume from centralized platforms to decentralized derivatives markets, new questions arise about oversight, jurisdiction, and consumer protection. While this introduces uncertainty, it also encourages governments to take DeFi more seriously, prompting frameworks that differentiate between self-custodied platforms and custodial intermediaries. This distinction may ultimately benefit the entire industry by legitimizing decentralized technologies and encouraging clearer guidelines that support innovation rather than stifle it.

Finally, the rise of perpetual DEXs is pushing crypto toward a more mature financial ecosystem. With transparent derivatives markets gaining traction, DeFi now supports a full set of financial primitives: lending, spot trading, stablecoin liquidity, synthetic assets, and leveraged derivatives. This marks the transition from a fragmented experimental market to a robust financial system capable of supporting sophisticated economic activity. Perpetual DEXs did not merely join this ecosystem—they catalyzed its evolution by proving that decentralized markets can support complex, high-volume financial instruments at scale.

Conclusion

The ascent of perpetual DDEXs is a defining chapter in the evolution of decentralized finance. What began as a response to the vulnerabilities of centralized exchanges has grown into a vibrant, high-performance ecosystem where transparency, autonomy, and innovation converge. Perpetual DEXs did not rise solely because traders wanted leverage—they rose because traders wanted control, clarity, and fairness in how their positions are managed. They wanted the sophistication of modern derivatives without the opaque custody and operational risks that centralized exchanges repeatedly exposed.

Technological advancements played a critical role. High-speed chains, Layer-2 scaling, robust oracle systems, and hybrid liquidity models collectively eliminated the performance limitations that once held decentralized derivatives back. As infrastructure matured, perpetual DEXs achieved a level of execution quality that could rival or exceed centralized platforms—without sacrificing the decentralized guarantees that traders value.

Equally important is the cultural shift. The global trading community has grown more conscious of custodial risk, regulatory inconsistency, and the dangers of trusting private entities with public liquidity. Perpetual DEXs answered these concerns with an architecture that requires no trust, hides nothing, and operates purely through algorithmic precision. This ideological shift, combined with the practical benefits of permissionless access and self-custody, reshaped how traders think about where and how they trade.

As a result, perpetual DEXs have become the fastest-growing market in crypto. They offer an unmatched blend of leverage, speed, transparency, and global accessibility—qualities that make them not just relevant, but central to the future of on-chain finance. Their impact extends beyond derivatives trading, influencing liquidity patterns, infrastructure innovation, and regulatory conversations across the entire industry.

Looking ahead, perpetual DEXs will continue to evolve. Future generations will feature unified cross-chain liquidity, AI-enhanced risk engines, and new asset classes ranging from RWAs to synthetic indexes. But their core identity will remain unchanged: a trading model built on transparency, autonomy, and decentralized control. This is why perpetual DEXs are trending—and why they will remain one of the most important pillars of the crypto financial system in the years to come.