Crypto perpetual trading is not what it used to be. For years, centralized exchanges had the whole thing pretty much locked down, but CoinGecko’s State of Crypto Perpetuals Report 2026 shows that the landscape is starting to change in a real way. Centralized platforms still control most of the market, but decentralized perpetual exchanges are no longer just a side story. They are growing fast enough now that the rest of the industry has to pay attention.
Perpetual contracts have been part of crypto since BitMEX launched the format in 2016, and they quickly became one of the most important products in the market. Traders use them for leverage, speculation, hedging, and just about everything in between. CoinGecko says centralized perpetual exchanges processed $85.3 trillion in volume in 2025 alone, which gives you an idea of how massive this corner of the market has become.
Even so, the balance is shifting. Decentralized perpetual exchanges, or Perp DEXes, used to feel like a niche product for a more technical crowd. That is no longer the case. Better product design, stronger on-chain activity, and a clear demand for self-custody have helped push them into the mainstream conversation. They are not just growing, they are starting to matter in a way they did not a year or two ago.
One of the clearest signs of how competitive this market has become is the pace of new contract listings. From January 2025 to April 2026, MEXC and BingX were the most active exchanges, listing 879 and 565 perpetual contracts, respectively. That is a lot of activity, and it shows how aggressively both platforms have been going after newer and lower-cap assets.
Growing Competition Between Perp CEXes and DEXes
A lot of other exchanges have been far more cautious. In fact, six of the top 11 exchanges averaged fewer than 20 new perpetual listings per month. Crypto.com had the fewest, with just a handful each month. The report also shows that larger exchanges are still more active in perpetual listings than spot listings. Binance, for example, added 305 new perpetual markets in the past 16 months, compared with 125 new spot listings. A lot of those contracts were tied to memecoins and AI-related tokens, which says a lot about where demand has been.
Still, perpetual listings are not exactly easy to expand because they usually take longer to approve and tend to involve more compliance work than spot pairs. And even with all this activity, the total number of perpetual listings is still pretty small compared with the broader token market. CoinGecko says 7,803 new tokens were listed on the platform since January 2025, while the top 11 CEXes added perpetual markets for only 1,030 tokens.
Trading volume on centralized perpetual exchanges has also softened this year. CoinGecko reports that the top 11 Perp CEXes saw average monthly volume fall from $7.11 trillion in 2025 to $4.69 trillion in the first four months of 2026. That is a 34 percent drop. Binance and OKX remain the clear leaders, with Binance holding a 33 percent market share and OKX sitting at 15 percent. BingX has also had a strong start to 2026, lifting its share from 3 percent last year to 5 percent now. Bitget, meanwhile, has seen a much sharper decline, with monthly average volume dropping from $740.62 billion to $287.08 billion.
The more interesting story, though, is happening on the decentralized side. CoinGecko says the top 12 Perp DEXes averaged $611.57 billion in monthly volume in 2026, up from $531.65 billion in 2025. January was especially strong at $751.59 billion, before volume eased off to $481.84 billion in April. Even so, those numbers are still much higher than where the market was a year ago. That follows a huge year for decentralized perpetuals in 2025, when annual volume reached $6.38 trillion, up from just $1.50 trillion in 2024.
A big part of that growth came from Hyperliquid, which helped bring Perp DEX trading into the spotlight. CoinGecko says the perp DEX to CEX volume ratio peaked at 13 percent in November 2025 before slipping back to 10 percent in April 2026. That may sound like a small dip, but it still shows how much ground decentralized trading has gained. Hyperliquid remains the biggest name in the space. In April 2026, it handled $190.28 billion in volume, which put it just behind BingX and comfortably ahead of KuCoin.
Other newer players, including Pacifica, Extended, and Variational, are also starting to gain traction. Their points programs seem to be helping, and many traders appear to be betting that airdrops could be on the way. Open interest paints a similar picture. Total crypto open interest fell from $120.35 billion at the start of 2025 to $99.09 billion by the end of April 2026. But even with that decline, the share held by Perp DEXes has risen to 13.5 percent, up from just 3.6 percent at the start of 2025.
That is a pretty big shift in a relatively short time. CoinGecko also points out that the rise of real-world assets on-chain is helping push more users toward decentralized perpetuals. Traders who want exposure to traditional markets are increasingly looking for ways to do that without leaving crypto. Centralized exchanges have noticed the trend too, and some are now starting to list RWA-linked perpetual contracts of their own. The bottom line is simple. Centralized exchanges still dominate perpetual trading, but decentralized platforms are clearly closing the gap. The market is changing, and it is not slowing down anytime soon.
