Aster DEX Launches Privacy Layer-1 as Trading Volume Falls 76% From Peak

Decentralized perpetual exchange Aster has officially launched the mainnet of its purpose-built layer-1 blockchain for derivatives trading.

The rollout follows a phased structure. Chain Genesis is now live, with a partnership reveal scheduled for March 18. Furthermore, public staking for $ASTER token holders will arrive later this week, and broader ecosystem expansion will follow.

What Is Aster Chain?

According to the team, Aster Chain supports 100,000 transactions per second, 50-millisecond block times, and charges no gas fees. Cross-chain deposits are supported from $BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana.

The chain also has default privacy. Every transaction routes through a one-time stealth address, and orders are encrypted using zero-knowledge proofs.

“Account Privacy is on by default. Your transactions settle on-chain, but no one sees them. Still verifiable, just not by everyone,” the announcement read. “Want to prove what you did? Generate a Viewer Pass. It decrypts your on-chain records for anyone you share it with. No one else can access them. Keep it SAFU.”

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$ASTER Token Rallies Against a Volume Slide

The launch received public support from Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the co-founder of Binance, whose family office, YZi Labs, backs Aster.

The announcement also sent the token higher. $ASTER reached an intraday high of $0.79 yesterday, its highest price since mid-January 2026. At press time, the altcoin had pulled back to $0.74, up 0.062% on the day.

$ASTER Token Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets

The new launch comes amid a decline in platform activity. DefiLlama showed that weekly perpetual trading volume peaked at $76.6 billion in October 2025 and has since dropped to roughly $18 billion, a contraction of over 76%.

Total value locked (TVL) has also dipped from over $2 billion to around $949 million at press time.

Aster Perp Volume and TVL. Source: DefiLlama

Aster remains one of the top perpetual decentralized exchanges by volume, but the drop reflects mounting competitive pressure from Hyperliquid as the broader on-chain derivatives market has consolidated since its breakout period in 2025.

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