Odaily Exclusive Interview with Aster: DEX Will Ultimately Consume the Entire Trading World, and Privacy Options Are the Key Step

Recently, Aster has started key steps as it marks its one-year milestone with a fresh beginning, building the critical infrastructure for enterprise-grade privacy DeFi. On March 17, the Aster Chain mainnet officially went live, aiming to provide traders with fair ordering and an optional privacy trading experience. Soon after, on March 20, Aster Chain’s native staking feature launched, deeply binding network security and ecosystem growth through a dual-reward mechanism.

From record-breaking trading volumes in the second half of 2025, to successfully completing a brand upgrade and TGE, and now to the launch of its L1 mainnet, Aster is rapidly evolving from an innovative Perp DEX into a more complete infrastructure layer.

However, in today’s environment—where the L1 space is overly saturated, market sentiment is cool, macro conditions have dramatically shifted, and attention is severely fragmented— is launching an L1 really the best time? Where does Aster Chain’s differentiated advantage lie? And what kind of roadmap comes next?

To answer these questions, Odaily Planet Daily held a special interview with Aster CEO Leonard, exploring the key decisions from the past year, his insights into the industry’s challenges, and his long-term vision for building “trusted infrastructure.”

I’ve found that its core logic is: “first users and revenue, then the mainnet,” not “cold start.” This means every step Aster takes is grounded in real demand and market validation. At the same time, Aster Chain’s unique value proposition of “optional privacy” is the source of its moat.

In Aster’s story, there are far too many details that Web3 founders can learn from. Below, Aster CEO Leonard will tell this story in the first person—enjoy~

What did Aster get right over the past year?

Starting in the second half of 2025, the platform’s 24h trading volume kept breaking through new highs—rising from $1 billion in June to $11 billion in September—making it clear the project was developing at a breathtaking pace. Also in September, during Aster’s TGE, it delivered achievements such as 24h trading volume surpassing $345 million, 330,000 new wallet addresses, and platform TVL exceeding $1 billion, consolidating Aster’s position in the DEX market. When trading volume broke records, it made us realize that we entered the right track at the right time.

Along with the TGE, the brand successfully transitioned from APX to Aster.

And when we launched a real L1 mainnet with “optional privacy” functionality, it was a unique product that no one in the market offered, and it was also a prerequisite for on-chain trading to move toward large-scale adoption.

The darkest moment—how did you get through it?

When we first reshaped the brand, the market was almost monopolized by Hyperliquid—at the time, nobody thought anyone could challenge their position. Before our TGE, for a long time the public believed it was impossible. Before Aster’s TGE, the expected FDV (fully diluted valuation) wasn’t high, but in the end we received a valuation far higher than expected, which led the market to reassess Perp DEX (decentralized perpetual contract exchange) projects.

In fact, we once even delayed the TGE plan because we thought there was still room for improvement before going live. However, we later decided to choose “execution speed” over “pursuing perfection.” Looking back, that was the right decision.

The lesson we learned is this: in emerging markets like Perp DEX, there’s no such thing as a “standard script” for handling the most difficult problems. Most consensus-based advice only applies to normal circumstances. There’s no magic here—only believing in what you do and then working relentlessly.

And the belief that enables the team to “embrace hardship” is: DEX will ultimately consume the entire trading world, and “optional privacy” is the key to making that happen.

Behind the rapid growth, what team growth experience can be reused?

As the project scaled, we proactively moved away from decision-making patterns that relied on intuition early on, and instead deeply depended on data. Now Aster’s organizational structure is more refined, decisions are more systematic, and each team’s metrics are clearer—so growth can be quantified and tracked.

Even as the organization gets bigger, some underlying logic never changes: a sense of ownership from everyone, fully accountable for the final outcome; refusing hesitation, act first; and result-oriented, meaning the process ultimately must translate into real value for users and the protocol.

To maintain the early team’s execution power and judgment, we adopted three major strategies: extreme flatness—no internal friction, keeping management layers as lean as possible, reducing ineffective communication chains to ensure transparent, symmetric information; decision delegation—full authorization: give teams clear KPIs and Ownership, and put decision-making power in the hands of the people closest to the battlefield; do it first, then make it perfect—emphasize “rapid delivery, quick iteration,” and let the market provide first-hand correction feedback so you can iterate and optimize in a real environment.

The hardest era for a new L1? How does Aster Chain define itself?

First, let’s talk about the technical differentiated design. Aster Chain adopts a ZK + Stealth Address architecture: Stealth Address makes every transaction private by default, and ZKproof makes every private transaction verifiable. (For friends interested in the technical details of how Aster Chain balances on-chain fund transparency and transaction privacy, please see Gitbook. )

For developers, we introduced Aster Code, which is an ecosystem for fee sharing. The core benefit is enabling developers to build their own trading interfaces and directly automate revenue generation from them.

In addition, Aster Code also improves developers’ integration efficiency by providing a transparent and controlled authorization mechanism, supporting data monitoring and instant settlement.

The real challenge for L1: after the mainnet launches, how do you keep developers and users?

The L1 battle is a liquidity competition.

The technical approach is a baseline requirement—users should not feel the difference between centralized and decentralized architectures when they trade. Aster Perp DEX’s users are, in essence, also users of Aster Chain. We had users first, and even revenue before starting the mainnet—this is the success pattern for this cycle’s project, not the approach of launching a chain first and then looking for a business model.

On ecosystem growth, I believe that privacy options will drive enterprises’ substantive adoption of decentralized trading, which has long been the main barrier. Now that we’ve provided privacy functionality, enterprises will at least start trying to shift some trading flow on-chain. They have strong reasons to do so: they want diversification, and many institutions already believe that the future of trading lies in DEX. They just need a viable solution. And now, that solution exists—it’s Aster Chain.

What will the future industry landscape look like? And what is Aster’s moat?

Privacy and the core trading experience are our core. In the liquidity competition arena, network effects mean capital will inevitably concentrate at the top players. I think it’s very likely that the future will form a “oligopoly” pattern dominated by the top three players; for DEX, this concentration could be even higher.

Because for DEX, restrictions based on geography or market segmentation are almost nonexistent. The main differentiation in competition comes from different design principles and philosophies. Just like Aster has always focused on privacy and is willing to make the necessary trade-offs for this core value—this actually becomes our moat, allowing us to survive in long-term competition.

When engaging with B-side partners, what most moved potential collaborators?

Aster Chain is actively pursuing partnerships across the Web2 and Web3 space.

There is huge potential for product collaboration when Web3 companies work with us. For example, we’re currently discussing with other stablecoin projects and exploring collaboration models similar to the World Liberty Financial architecture. In addition, we’re also paying attention to prediction markets, because there’s a high overlap between prediction market users and traders of perpetual contract decentralized exchanges (perp DEX), making obvious cross-selling opportunities.

In Web2, most discussions focus on financial companies. The most common interest points are: building a market on Aster or listing assets for trading—these kinds of collaborations are the easiest milestone goals for them to achieve. While large companies, especially regulated financial institutions, may take a long time to set up partnerships, once they confirm, we will announce externally.

What should be done now, based on a backward look from future judgment

After the mainnet goes live, Aster’s priorities in Q2 include:

• Attract users with privacy needs, professional traders, and institutional traders;
• Increase asset variety and liquidity;
• Expand the ecosystem through Aster Code and Aster Chain;
• Strengthen token utility and governance;
• Optimize the trading interface (UI/UX)……

In a crypto market downturn, with external AI running hot, how does Aster adjust its pace or respond?

Aster can’t predict the market. It can only focus on building—surviving in the winter and continuously creating value is the only certain path to the next ATH.

As for the AI trend, Aster has already provided relevant skill interfaces for AI agents. Although we’re not AI experts, we can empower AI developers and agents so they can build tools on Aster, and then feed us back on how to optimize the product—so Aster is not only friendly to humans, but also attractive to AI agents.

In a few years, I hope the industry’s assessment of Aster will be: an infrastructure that users can trust long term—one that can carry funds and strategies.