Aster vs Lighter

Funding is signed. Positive means longs pay shorts, negative means longs get paid to hold. Venues settle on different native periods (hourly on Hyperliquid, dYdX, Lighter, Extended, Pacifica, Ondo, Vest, StandX and ApeX, every 4h on edgeX, every 8h on Kalshi, Aster and the CEX books); every figure is normalized from the venue's own quoted rate and interval before ranking. Funding is only the holding cost. Opening costs (taker fee, spread, impact) are the companion bench perp-fees.

Ranked only with 24 hours of funding history (288 samples) and a stddev above zero: a young listing, or a venue whose rate has not moved since listing (Ondo Perps at launch, Polymarket in July), reads artificially stable and shows as Provisional, never as the leader. Stability is not directionality: a persistently positive but tight band ranks above a rate that flips every settlement.

Counts reflect each venue's live market catalog at query time, mainnet only. The asset class comes from the venue's own metadata where it publishes one; Hyperliquid HIP-3 dexes and dYdX publish none, so their symbols are matched against the crypto markets the other venues list and a fixed table of forex, commodity and index names. Tokenized gold (PAXG, XAUT) is a crypto token and is not counted. A market counts once whether it trades 24/7 or only during exchange hours.

TVL from DefiLlama /protocol/{slug} currentChainTvls, excluding staking and pool2 categories. Market count from each venue's native API (same source as the perp-active-markets bench). The ratio reflects architectural choices, not absolute liquidity: a high ratio means the venue can list many markets cheaply, not that each market has deep liquidity. Compare with perp-volume-share for the liquidity angle.

P/F = circulating market cap (CoinGecko) / annualized fees (DeFiLlama dailyFees, trailing 30d x 365/30), on the DeFiLlama parent the token accrues from. Fees include the share paid to liquidity providers; P/S uses protocol revenue only. Low-float tokens show a much higher FDV/F than P/F. Pre-TGE venues are listed unranked with fees and OI, no ratio. A low multiple is not a recommendation.

Volume is self-reported by each venue's public data surface and counted per UTC day, one side of each trade. Perimeters differ slightly per venue and are stated in the ledger notes. A closed day can be restated by a venue for one to two days; the harness re-reads the last three days every hour. Not a measure of organic flow: incentive programs and wash trading inflate notional on every venue.

The ratio is a screen, not a verdict. Both terms are the venue's own figures (24h volume and open interest as each API reports them, in USD), so a venue that counts both legs of a fill moves its ratio without changing anything real. A very low ratio (Ostium, 0.2x) means positions held for days on thin daily volume; a very high one (Kalshi, above 40x) means a day of trading dwarfs what stays open. The bands in the methodology say what each range usually means.

Every row is a month of funding at the venue's average daily cost over the hours measured in the trailing 30 days (average x 30). A venue ranks only with 576 of the 720 hours (24 days) behind that average; under the floor the row is provisional, unranked, and shows its day count (the venues added on 2026-09-22 and 2026-09-23 start there). Funding is signed: on a month where shorts paid longs the figure is negative and "cheapest" means "was paid the most".

A screen, not a verdict, and not advice. P/F = circulating market cap (CoinGecko) / annualized fees (DeFiLlama, trailing 30d x 365/30) summed across every fee adapter that accrues to the token. Fees include the share paid to liquidity providers. A low multiple can mean the market expects fees to fall, that the fees were incentivised, or that the token has no claim on them. Read it with the float, the category median and the monthly fee trend, then do your own work.