Over the last few months, we have seen a strong rise in onchain perp DEXs, with a good number of them developing their own competitive moats and capturing market share.
In 2025, trading volume on perp DEXs reached a record $12.09 trillion, having reached 65% of total lifetime volume within a single year.
At the most basic level, perpetuals allow people to trade with more money than they hold by using leverage. Someone with $10 can open a position as if they had $200. That is why perps became popular in crypto. They literally give small traders more exposure.
Decibel is one of those DEXs. Although it is currently in testnet, it is one of the products an entire chain is bullish on, and there are a couple of amazing things up its sleeve.
If you have been around Aptos for a while, you will most likely be familiar with the term Global Trading Engine. The idea is that anything you can do in the world can potentially be done more efficiently if everything is handled in a composable onchain way. Over time, Aptos has proven to be a good stack for onchain throughput and latency, which is an edge for products being built on top of it, Decibel being one of them.
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What’s the onboarding like?
This right here is one good reason, aside from having not so good products, why most people do not interact with certain apps. Some apps and products are built mainly for crypto native users, so a normie or someone who trades stocks and wants to try perps may experience friction at first.
While trying it out, I noticed one thing that was intentionally done to improve the user experience.
Normally, you need to download or have a specific wallet, since some wallets are chain specific. You also need to get some native token to pay for gas. So it is usually not as easy as just logging in and starting to use the app. It can take at least a couple of hours, or even a couple of days, if you do not already have an exchange set up to buy crypto.
But on Decibel, there are several wallet options to choose from. For normies, you can simply use Google sign in, and a wallet will automatically be created for you, tied to that particular social login.
A lot of users on chains like Solana or Ethereum, or any other chain, might not have an Aptos wallet. But they can just connect Phantom or MetaMask the same way they would connect to any other native dApp, and an Aptos wallet will be created for them.
You don’t need a new wallet to trade on Decibel. Fund from Aptos, Ethereum, Solana, or directly from a CEX. Cross-chain accounts on Decibel make it simple to position capital where you already are. Here’s a quick guide on how
When transferring USDC, you can move it across chains. Your USDC is burned on Solana and deposited on Aptos. In the same way, if you want to withdraw your USDC from your Decibel Aptos account, you transfer it back to your Solana wallet. This allows you to move funds easily between both chains without much being lost, and with most of the process abstracted away.
Also, Decibel works for both advanced traders and everyday users. You do not need to understand the technical side to use it. To make things easier, the team shares simple tutorial videos that show how the product works. These videos are posted on Decibel’s X account.
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Trade Execution Speed
I mentioned earlier that Aptos is a good tech stack for building products that depend heavily on speed and efficiency. Across their timeline, there are upgrades aimed at beating previous records in sub second finality.
This feature right here is another edge Decibel is leveraging.
Personally, I am not a fan of leverage above 20x or 30x. If you are going to trade with 50x, 100x, or more, execution has to be extremely fast, because a literal second can mean blowing up your portfolio. Your PnL card could look really good or really nasty because of this.
Speaking of which, the PnL card is really cool. I took a trade on BTC, and it is green right now.
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User Interface
Who does not love good design?
I would give the design team their flowers. The frontend design is impressive and runs without lag.
If there is one tab that does not work properly, it is the Points tab, which is a sub tab under “More”.
That would probably be integrated somewhere close to mainnet launch.
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Feedback and Iteration
Successful Web3 products do not grow only by having amazing features. They grow through people who feel involved in the product. Decibel is being developed in public, with early testers, builders, and traders invited to try it out.
This creates feedback loops that help the team build a better product that people love and iterate toward a higher level of utility.
A few weeks back, I noticed a bug in one of my market orders. The liquidation price was not consistent before and after executing the trade. A different liquidation price would show up once my trade was executed.
Here it is.
I gave the team feedback, and it has now been corrected.
It has been rectified
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Final Takes
Perps today mostly cover crypto assets, but long term, the same trading model on Decibel can apply to real world assets and traditional markets. Imagine idle liquidity on Decibel earning yield. It is all part of the plan.
This is what it looks like when infrastructure, user experience, and composability are treated as one system.