The big waves wash away the sand, and a review of the seven mainstream DEXs in one article

Author: Scof, ChainCatcher

Edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

The current status of decentralized exchanges has sparked widespread discussion in the past week.

Hyperliquid shocked the market due to the 50-fold leverage whales' "self-explosion arbitrage" and its HLP vault lost nearly US$4 million after receiving the liquidation order.

On the other hand, GMGN, which was in full swing during the Pump period, also fell into a dilemma that cannot be ignored. According to Dune, the platform's revenue has plummeted from $2.34 million on January 19 to $74,000 on March 11, plunging nearly 97%. At the same time, the community's feedback on high KOL marketing expenses, user churn and CEX entry have led to intensified competition, which has caused users to have further concerns about the future of GMGN.

In this way, ChainCatcher has included the recent returns of seven mainstream DEXs in this article for readers to refer to.

Quick interpretation (no ink, just look at the conclusion)

• Jupiter and PancakeSwap still maintain high single-day returns, and long-term returns are stable.
• Hyperliquid has led the earnings in the past 24 hours, but it still has a significant decline from its historical highs.
• Raydium and Shadow Exchange earnings dropped significantly, and market activity weakened significantly.
• Although Aerodrome, THENA and others have declined severely, they still have certain profitability.

The following is a comparison of the recent 24-hour earnings of several mainstream DEXs and the highest single-day earnings in history:

Note: The full text data source is Defilama, as of March 12

**Disassemble one by one to see the recent situation and trends of

mainstream DEXs**

1. Shadow Exchange

✅Background and Positioning : Deploy the centralized liquidity layer and exchange native to Sonic. Powered by the x(3,3) incentive model, the goal is to provide an efficient, low-cost trading experience.
📉Returns data : All-time high of 864.44K , 83K in the past 24 hours, down 90.30% .
📊Market Performance : It ranked among the top ten cryptocurrency revenue in the past 30 days, and user activity remains stable. The x(3,3) mechanism improves the efficiency of capital utilization, the MEV protection mechanism optimizes the trading experience, and liquidity providers and traders have considerable returns. The Gems reward system attracts deep participation of Sonic ecosystems, promotes the expansion of the protocol ecosystem, and shows the potential for sustained growth.

2. Raydium

✅Background and Positioning: Solana's top AMM DEX, which has attracted a large number of users in the past with low handling fees and efficient transactions.
📉Returnover data: The highest of 3.39M, only 48K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 98.57%, and market activity fell sharply. Its native token 📊 market performance: In Q4 2024, it once accounted for 61% of SolanaDEX trading volume, but TVL was only 39% of Uniswap, indicating that the trading was active but the liquidity was relatively insufficient. At the same time, since Raydium's transaction volume is highly derived from the support of Pump.fun, it is necessary to seek to expand the layout of new non-meme fields in the future.

3. Jupiter

✅Background and Positioning : The Solana ecosystem’s top DEX aggregator provides the best trading path optimization and is the core pillar of Solana DeFi transaction volume.
📉Returns data : An all-time high of 3.13M , 329K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 89.46% , but compared with other DEXs, it still maintains a high level of activity.
📊Market Performance : As the DEX with the largest trading volume in Solana, it has high deep liquidity and cross-platform integration, and has low user transaction costs. However, some time ago, the Libra incident was questioned for insider trading, and no further investigation results have been found.

4. PancakeSwap

✅Background and Positioning : DEX, the leader of the BSC ecosystem, remains competitive with low Gas fees, high-speed transactions and multi-chain expansion (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.).
📉Returnover data : The highest in history is 6.4M , 1.11M in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 82.65% , but it still maintains high profitability in the DeFi field.
📊Market performance : Thanks to the activity of the BSC ecosystem, PancakeSwap has a broad DeFi user base and continuously expands product functions (such as NFT, staking, etc.).

5. Hyperliquid

✅Background and Positioning : Arbitrum's ecosystem's decentralized derivatives trading platform adopts an active market-making mechanism to form a differentiated competition with GMX.
📉Returnover data : An all-time high of 4.42M , 1.17M in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 73.52% , but it still dominates the DeFi derivatives market.
📊Market Performance : Hyperliquid remains ahead in terms of trading volume and profitability thanks to traders attracted by high leverage trading. However, due to the impact of whale arbitrage incident, users have doubts about their liquidity management mechanism, resulting in some funds being risk-averse escaped.

6. Aerodrome

✅Background and Positioning : The core DEX of the Base ecosystem adopts ve(3,3) economic model to inspire liquidity providers and optimize trading experience.
📉Returnover data : The highest is 1.52M , 290K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 80.91% . Market liquidity has declined but it still maintains a certain degree of activity.
📊Market performance : Dominates the Base ecosystem, thanks to the recent signs of Golden Dog in Jindou’s recovery, the market performance is strong, trading volume and market capitalization continue to grow, and community participation is high.

7. THENA

✅Background and Positioning : One of the DEXs of the BNB ecosystem, adopting the ve(3,3) economic model, aims to improve the sustainability of liquidity incentives.
📉Returnover data : The highest is 208.95K , 48K in the past 24 hours, a decrease of 77.02% . Despite the decline, it still has a certain competitiveness in the BSC ecosystem.
📊Market performance : It is a second-tier DEX in the BSC ecosystem and faces strong competition from PancakeSwap, but its ve(3,3) model can still attract some liquidity. According to the website disclosure, THENA is planning to migrate to the V3 version. This upgrade will introduce the "hooks" feature, allowing smart contracts to be deployed on specific liquidity pools to execute specific logic when users interact. This will support advanced order types, complex applications and customized requirements, further enhancing the flexibility and functionality of the protocol.

At present, decentralized exchanges are showing a trend of decline in returns, intensified competition, and structural differentiation . The revenue of mainstream platforms generally fell by 70%-98% from historical highs, and market activity was significantly affected.

Jupiter and PancakeSwap are still firmly in the lead , with high daily returns and relatively stable performance in the long term. They rely on their ecological layout and user base to maintain competitiveness. Hyperliquid still occupies a place in the derivatives market, but due to the whale arbitrage incident , the liquidity of capital has been impacted. Raydium and Shadow Exchange earnings have shrunk significantly, the former was affected by the decline in Pump.fun trading volume, while the latter was due to the weakening of overall market activity. Aerodrome and THENA still have some profitability, but they face the squeeze of stronger competitors in their respective ecosystems.

In the future, DEX still needs to face three core issues :

1. How to maintain trading activity - the market cools down, users' trading willingness declines, and how DEX can improve user stickiness?
2. How to optimize liquidity management - whale arbitrage and CEX competition intensifies, and how can the platform build a more stable liquidity system in the DeFi field?
3. How to achieve sustainable income - In the bear market cycle, the high-hand fee model is difficult to support in the long term. Does DEX need a new profit model?

Faced with industry challenges, DEX's future survival may no longer be about trading volume, but about liquidity, risk control mechanism and ecological layout .