Aster leads on all 5 live benchmarks. Aster wins on Perp DEX volume share, live 24h notional ranked ($592.11M vs $467.40M), Most tradable markets on a perp DEX, live count per venue (596 vs 58), Perp DEX asset breadth (124 vs 43), Perp DEX volume to open interest (0.536x vs 2.15x). Data as of 2026-10-11 UTC.
Read methodology Last measured Window: rolling 24h6 shared benchmarks, 5 measured on both sides
Aster is a decentralized perps exchange (ex-ApolloX, backed by YZi Labs) on BNB Chain and other EVM networks, with a Binance-compatible API and 8 hour funding periods.
Lighter's Robinhood deployment: the same zk order-book engine as Lighter mainnet on a separate host (api.rh.lighter.xyz) with its own books, listing US equities next to crypto perps.
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.
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.
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".
Frequently asked questions
Aster vs Lighter RH: which one is better?
Aster and Lighter RH are compared on 6 shared OpenChainBench benchmarks. Aster leads on Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized. See the live table on this page for every metric.
Which is cheaper, Aster or Lighter RH?
On the Cheapest perp venue to hold a position, live funding normalized benchmark, Aster leads at ~0 bps versus Lighter RH at 0.45 bps. Live measurement is updated continuously by the OpenChainBench harness.
How is the Aster vs Lighter RH comparison measured?
Every benchmark on this page uses the same open methodology, published at https://openchainbench.com/methodology. Data is CC-BY-4.0. Measurement harnesses are MIT-licensed.
Auto-generated pairs require: both providers in the same benchmark for seven consecutive days, at least 1000 samples per provider, observable third-party search demand, and a public /products/[slug] page on OCB. Editorially curated pairs (like this one) may publish early when search demand is high and data is accruing; panels with fewer than 100 samples are shown as provisional. The full pair ledger is versioned in the public repo.
