Aster climbed to a new record high on Tuesday after the decentralized derivatives platform overtook Hyperliquid in trading volume for the second day in a row.
DefiLlama data shows that on Sept. 24, Aster, formerly ApolloX, handled more than $23 billion in perpetual futures trades, more than double Hyperliquid’s $10 billion on the same day.
Despite the surge, Hyperliquid still leads on a monthly basis, recording nearly $300 billion in transactions over the past 30 days compared with Aster’s $48 billion.
The trading burst fueled a sharp rise in Aster’s token, which climbed to a new high of $2.40 and pushed its fully diluted valuation to around $20 billion.
Total value locked on the platform also spiked, jumping from $366 million a week ago to $1.78 billion, a gain of nearly 400%.
Aster has defied recent market movements to become one of the best-performing assets over the past week. The platform has drawn significant interest after Binance founder Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao expressed strong support on social media.
Stablecoin growth and L1
Aster has also expanded the supply of its USDF stablecoin, issued with custody support from Ceffu.
Messari data shows the supply grew 4x in size to 262 million tokens over the past week, and if the pace holds, the figure could reach $1 billion soon.
Meanwhile, the platform’s daily revenue surged to $9 million on Sept. 24, ranking it ahead of Circle and second only to Tether.
In a recent interview, Aster CEO Leonard said Aster is running internal tests for a proprietary Layer 1 blockchain, moving beyond its initial structure that relied on multiple networks.
The developments come amid an industry-wide boom in perpetual futures trading. In August, on-chain derivatives volume totaled $765 billion, surpassing the entire market throughput recorded in 2023.