Dialogue with Aster CEO: Using L1 to Drive Institutional Adoption, Aster Ninjas Strike in 2026

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

If we take action, there will always be tangible output.

This is the explanation Aster CEO Leonard Leung gives for “ninja spirit,” prompted by the community’s curiosity about the “🥷 - ninja” figure that frequently appears in social media materials. True strength doesn’t need to prove itself with noise.

In a sense, this line can also serve as a genuine reflection of Aster over the past year.

Under the near-constant high pressure of Hyperliquid’s dominance, in September 2025, Aster within the TGE burst onto the scene like a dark horse, becoming a latecomer you can’t ignore in the Perp DEX arena.

With Aster’s first anniversary and two major milestones—Aster Chain—arriving at just the right time, we sat down for an in-depth conversation with Leonard.

On “ninja spirit,” Leonard views it as a form of extreme execution power:

“ Ninja spirit ” is one of the Aster team’s guiding principles. We pursue continuous delivery instead of overpromising; we build trust with results.

This restraint and resolve run through the entire conversation. When asked about Aster’s achievements over the past year, Leonard gives a direct assessment:

Aster entered the right track at the right time. Perp DEX is a market with clear vertical value.

When asked about an effective growth strategy after the TGE, Leonard stays clear-headed:

Airdrops are a double-edged sword. The only important metric for using an airdrop well is: how much incentivized traffic ultimately converts into real users and forms sustainable revenue and retention. Aster’s goal is very clear—we want users to come because of the airdrop and stay because of the product.

And when discussing the launch of Aster Chain, Leonard emphasizes that this move isn’t driven by pressure to “have to upgrade,” but rather an active strategic choice:

From the very beginning of its founding, Aster has treated privacy as a core value. With Aster Chain, Aster can natively embed privacy capabilities at the infrastructure level, while also combining stability with efficient responsiveness—strongly supporting institutions’ real-world adoption of decentralized trading.

In this episode, let’s follow Leonard Leung’s account to understand Aster’s major achievements over the past year. At the same time, through the details of Aster Chain’s layout, we’ll step into the new competitive landscape for DEX in 2026, and see the bigger future Aster is betting on.

Aster’s first anniversary: Picked the right track, and achieved success

Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for your time. Aster has gone through extremely fast growth this past year. Before we officially get into the topic, could you first, based on your own role, introduce what you mainly handle at Aster?

Leonard Leung:

Hello everyone, I’m Leonard Leung, the CEO of Aster. With Aster’s first anniversary upon us, I’m very glad to have the opportunity to share Aster’s journey and our thinking about future development.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the past year, it’s been a standout year for Aster in the DEX space. In a moment like the anniversary celebration—when it’s most suitable to “show off your scorecard”—what challenges did you find the most difficult, yet with the highest payoff?

Leonard Leung:

When we initially pushed our brand rework (Rebrand), the market was almost monopolized by Hyperliquid. At the time, almost nobody believed that a later entrant could shake up this situation. Especially before Aster’s TGE, for a long period the market generally believed it was nearly impossible.

Before Aster’s TGE, as far as I understand, the external expectations for Aster’s FDV (fully diluted valuation) weren’t particularly high. But in the end, we achieved a valuation far exceeding market expectations. This, to a large extent, also pushed the market to reexamine the space and value in the Perp DEX track.

Actually, at one point we even delayed our Aster TGE plan, because we believed there was still room for further optimization before the product officially went live. But later, we decided to choose “execution speed” rather than relentlessly “pursue perfection.” Looking back now, it was the right decision.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In the process of迎接挑战 (meeting challenges), at what moment did you feel that Aster had truly built its own core competitive strength?

Leonard Leung:

I think this moment appeared in the second half of 2025.

Entering the second half of 2025, Aster’s 24-hour trading volume continued to rise. After breaking 1 billion USD in June, by September it had grown to 11 billion USD. That kind of growth rate made us genuinely feel that the project was entering a phase of acceleration.

Of course, what left even more people with a lasting impression was Aster’s performance during the September TGE. At that time, the platform achieved multiple key milestones: 24-hour trading volume breaking 345 million USD, 330,000 new wallet addresses, and platform TVL surpassing 1 billion USD—further consolidating Aster’s position in the DEX market.

As the project kept setting new trading volume records, we became increasingly clear that Aster entered the right track at the right time, and Perp DEX is a market with clear vertical value.

And when we rolled out a real L1 mainnet with “optional privacy” functionality, this judgment became even more firm: we believe that Aster Chain is a unique product form that the market hasn’t seen yet, and it’s also an important prerequisite for pushing on-chain trading toward large-scale adoption.

Inside the privacy moat: Aster’s “ninja spirit” of continuous delivery

Deep Tide TechFlow: Behind these achievements are team decisions and execution. And in Aster’s social media, we can easily latch onto this distinct symbol of “🥷 - ninja” style. So we’d like to ask you to share: what kind of team temperament and working style does Aster hope to convey to the community through “🥷 - ninja”? Does this “🥷 - ninja spirit” also influence your decision-making style and how you manage the team?

Leonard Leung:

We chose “ninja” as Aster’s social media style symbol. The core isn’t mystery—it’s extreme action power.

Ninjas often possess great strength, but they don’t cause a fuss. Instead, they keep generating influence in a restrained and understated way. For Aster, this spirit corresponds to doing less talk and more work, executing first, and building trust through results.

More specifically, when it comes to Aster’s team style, I usually break this spirit into three layers:

Low-key and high-efficiency operating in parallel. We don’t pursue frequent exposure under the spotlight. Instead, we focus on quietly accumulating and completing the most precise strikes. Internally, this means high-frequency, precise coordination in how the team operates. Externally, we always remain restrained. It’s like a ninja never announces loudly before making a move, but every move aims for precise targeting.

Continuous delivery, not excessive promises. Compared with flashy promotion, we’re more inclined to “deliver results directly.” We don’t make promises lightly. But once we take action, there will definitely be tangible output. Because before we make any commitment, I ensure the team already has the capability to deliver—not using visions to secure short-term attention.

Execution comes first, let results speak. In Aster’s values, execution beats volume. We want all the team’s energy to be concentrated on realizing the blueprint, not polishing rhetoric or trying to craft a persona.

You could say that to a large extent, “ninja spirit” isn’t just a branding symbol—it’s a genuine code of conduct for the Aster team.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Crypto already has too many DEXs, yet Aster still found success. From your perspective, what is the most irreplaceable value Aster truly brings to users?

Leonard Leung:

If I had to summarize Aster’s most irreplaceable value, I think the core comes down to two points: privacy and trading experience.

From the very beginning of its founding, Aster has treated privacy as a core value, and it’s willing to make necessary trade-offs to support it. And precisely because of this坚持 (adherence) to privacy, we actually have our real moat—giving Aster the long-term staying power to survive in a highly competitive DEX market.

The launch of Aster Chain is designed to directly address long-standing trading pain points in the traditional DeFi market. Previously, position-sniping incidents on Hyperliquid occurred frequently, exposing the structural risks caused by overly high on-chain transparency. Aster’s answer is to find a truly feasible balance between transparent on-chain capital and private trading. This not only gives DEX users another safer choice, but more importantly, it creates real-world conditions for CEX whales to migrate large positions onto-chain.

Deep Tide TechFlow: In today’s DEX competition, what technical barriers do you think are truly difficult to replicate?

Leonard Leung:

DEX competition, at its core, is a prolonged contest for liquidity. Today, technical solutions have already become a baseline entry requirement. When users trade, they shouldn’t feel any difference between centralized and decentralized architectures—this is Aster’s central pursuit in terms of technology.

Growth is the essence: come for the airdrop, stay because of the product

Deep Tide TechFlow: “Growth” is also a topic that can’t be avoided. When did Aster’s growth peak over the past year? What factors drove it? And do you believe that growth strategy is still effective today? In response to the proposition of “growth,” what other cards does Aster have for the future?

Leonard Leung:

The growth peak occurred during the TGE period in September 2025.

It wasn’t driven by a single factor, but by multiple variables interlocking and reinforcing each other: precise product positioning, a well-thought-out tokenomics design, a clear and credible development roadmap—plus broad support and amplification from community users and industry opinion leaders. Together, these sparked the explosive growth in that phase.

The real inflection point in growth came when Perp DEX’s liquidity and product experience reached a level sufficient to contend with CEX. The market has always been searching for a more transparent alternative to CEX, and that’s exactly the fundamental reason Perp DEX took off.

Also, in the DeFi space, trust is crucial and hard-won. The BNB Chain and CZ endorsements helped us complete the key cold start (Bootstrap). Meanwhile, a series of factual long-term efforts by the team—continuous building and deep focus—also laid a solid foundation for trust. With trust as the cornerstone, user acquisition and conversion truly become possible.

Of course, for Perp DEX in this cycle, airdrop incentives have become standard. However, airdrops are a double-edged sword:

They can bring explosive user growth, but at the same time they attract a group of opportunists who don’t have real demand for the product itself.

But without airdrops, at least at the starting stage, you may not even get the ticket to compete.

Therefore, I believe that the key to using airdrops well lies in how to balance the proportion of real users versus “lu maomiao” (hair-receiving) participants, and how to correctly manage market expectations. All projects that choose to run airdrops must plan in advance and have the capability to absorb the post-TGE shock. Because as the “farmers move on” (turn to other opportunities), various data and revenue typically drop sharply.

I’ve always believed that the only truly important metric isn’t the pretty surface numbers during the airdrop incentive period, but how much of the incentivized traffic ultimately converts into real users and forms sustainable revenue and retention.

So our growth goal has always been very clear: come because of the airdrop, stay because of the product.

Aster Chain will strongly drive real adoption by institutions

Deep Tide TechFlow: On the occasion of the first anniversary, another major milestone for Aster is the arrival of Aster Chain. In your view, L1 is already overstocked—why does Aster still have to build its own L1?

Leonard Leung:

The most core motivation for choosing to build Aster Chain is to create an environment built specifically for perpetual contract trading.

We know that institutional trading pairs have higher requirements for confidentiality. For large traders, strategy exposure, front-running, and position-sniping all directly affect their actual willingness to trade. By building its own L1, Aster can natively embed privacy capabilities at the infrastructure level, better protecting trading behavior and ensuring that the strategies of large trades can’t be maliciously manipulated.

Additionally, we want to provide an experience comparable to centralized exchanges, where both response speed and stability are indispensable. Most of today’s generic L2s or general-purpose public chains struggle to balance both at once. Aster Chain sets its block time at 50ms and supports 100,000+ high TPS. That’s extremely important for high-frequency trading and high-leverage derivatives scenarios.

More importantly, having our own L1 means we can deeply customize everything from the “consensus mechanism” to the “execution layer.” Full control over the underlying technology stack further ensures that we can truly focus our attention on optimizing trading—continuously building a high-performance derivatives platform.

An L1 can also serve as the underlying support layer for all liquidity. This not only helps increase asset diversity, but also reduces reliance on a single stablecoin, thereby building a more robust and more extensible decentralized finance ecosystem.

From this perspective, only by building its own L1 does Aster have the opportunity to truly break through the limits of existing general-purpose public chains, fundamentally solving key issues that traders care about most—speed, privacy, and costs.

Deep Tide TechFlow: With the official launch of Aster Chain, what qualitative leaps will it bring to the Aster ecosystem and the entire DEX track?

Leonard Leung:

I believe Aster Chain will strongly drive institutions’ real adoption of decentralized trading.

The lack of privacy protections has long been the core obstacle preventing institutional capital from entering on-chain trading at scale. Now that Aster provides truly usable private trading solutions, institutions will at least start to attempt to move some of their trading activity onto-chain. The reasons are clear:

On one hand, institutions want to diversify their asset allocation. On the other hand, more and more institutions already believe that the future of trading will ultimately belong to DEX—they’ve simply been waiting for a sufficiently mature solution.

And now, Aster Chain is that solution.

Finally, another noteworthy point is that through the coordinated synergy of Aster Chain and Aster Code, developers and financial institutions can quickly deploy custom on-chain derivatives trading solutions. This means Aster isn’t just a trading platform. It’s an open infrastructure that can fully empower partners to build efficient, private, and competitive trading interfaces on the Aster chain—together expanding the boundaries of the entire ecosystem.

Deep Tide TechFlow: By launching Aster Chain at this time, does it mean Aster has reached the stage where it must upgrade its underlying capabilities?

Leonard Leung:

Product upgrades have always been the direction we continuously work toward. But the timing of launching Aster Chain isn’t driven by any pressure of “having to upgrade.” It’s an主动出击 (proactive) strategic choice.

Simply put, we saw real pain points existing in the market, identified the direction, mapped out the development schedule, and then executed.

When you clearly know what users need, and what current infrastructure can’t provide, and then you build according to plan, it’s a very natural choice.

Deep Tide TechFlow: As a regular user, what are the most direct day-to-day changes to your trading experience with the arrival of Aster Chain? During the important early window when Aster Chain is officially live, what opportunities and early benefits do regular users have?

Leonard Leung:

For regular users, the most direct change shows up in the product interface. Now, users can start using a series of new features, such as the Account Privacy switch, a blockchain explorer, and a Viewer Pass. They can immediately experience the flexibility and security brought by a “selectable” privacy trading environment, and none of it comes at the cost of sacrificing any trading speed—while also enjoying the convenience of zero gas fees.

Additionally, thanks to our strategic partnership with WLFI, the platform will expand support for USD1 contract trading pairs. Users will have more diverse asset choices, and trading scenarios will become even richer.

As for early participation benefits, the first thing we roll out is the Staking Program. It’s designed to provide exclusive incentives for early participants. Users can choose different validator nodes and staking durations; by staking $ASTER, they can earn rewards. For users interested in the detailed rules and participation methods, they can visit the official Gitbook to learn more.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Last question—if we time-travel to March 2027 for Aster’s two-year anniversary: what key achievements do you hope Aster will accomplish? And after another year of effort building, what kind of presence do you hope Aster becomes in users’ minds?

Leonard Leung:

Looking ahead at the next 12 months, what I’m most excited to see is that privacy features truly drive institutions’ real adoption of decentralized trading, and I also believe this expectation can be realized well.

As for what Aster becomes in users’ minds, I hope Aster becomes more than just a convenient trading platform. I hope it becomes infrastructure that can be trusted long-term—capable of carrying real funds and real trading strategies.