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|3 min ReadDEXs chase CEX speed as volumes surge and risks show
Jax Morales
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Retail piles into onchain perps. Institutions keep their fiat rails.
Bitget Wallet’s Jamie Elkaleh watches the split. Retail traders and semi-pro quants are rushing into decentralized exchanges. Institutions still sit with the centralized shops. That is the market right now. Retail loves the airdrops and the points. Quants want low fees, fast fills, and programmable strategies. Desks at banks and funds want fiat rails, compliance, and prime brokerage. Different needs, different rails, same goal.
Elkaleh says the execution gap is closing. Order-book DEXs like Hyperliquid, dYdX v4, and GMX now bring latency and depth that used to be CEX territory, he told Cointelegraph. The race is real. The spread tightens. Everybody knows it.
Onchain order books race for speed, transparency, and traders
Hyperliquid runs its own chain with an onchain central limit order book. Every order, cancellation, and fill can be audited. Sub-second finality. No gas fee per trade. The pitch is simple. CEX-like speed with self-custody. Performance without giving up decentralization, Elkaleh said.
Competition is heating up. On BNB Chain, Aster is pressing hard. Incentive campaigns pushed daily perp volume to record levels. On some days it even overtook Hyperliquid, Elkaleh said. Over the past day, Aster logged about 17 billion, according to DefiLlama data.
BNB and Solana ecosystems are rising. BNB perp protocols recently hit 70 billion in daily turnover, while Drift and Jupiter Perps gained ground. Fast settlement and smooth onboarding help. So do incentives. That is how you build flow.
Risks remain: engines, keys, bridges, and one bad line of code
DEXs still face tough risks. Elkaleh points to validator or sequencer centralization. Faulty oracles. Upgrade keys that can be abused. Bridge flaws. Then the hardest part during chaos. Keeping liquidation engines stable when the tape is wild.
We just saw it. On Friday, Aster reimbursed traders after a glitch in its Plasma (XPL) perpetual market. A hard-coded index error briefly sent prices near $4. That sparked unexpected liquidations and fees. A fast fix, a reimbursement, and the market moved on. But the lesson is clear. One line of code can move money.
Coexistence, not a knife fight, is the base case
Elkaleh does not see a zero-sum finish. DEXs are the future of crypto-native trading rails. CEXs remain essential for fiat liquidity and onboarding. Over the next decade, hybrid models may blend the strengths of both. A balanced market. Coexistence, not displacement. That is how the next phase gets built.
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