Perps charge more per trade. DEXs make more money.

Over the last 30 days:

-> Perpetual futures platforms processed $19.1B of trading activity and earned $87.3M in fees.

-> DEXs processed $228.8B of spot trading activity and earned $224.4M in fees.

Perps monetize harder per dollar.
DEXs monetize at far greater scale.

On fee efficiency alone, perps win:

• 0.46% per dollar traded on perps
• 0.10% per dollar traded on DEXs

But on absolute cash flow, DEXs still dominate:

DEXs earn ~2.6× more total fees than perps

That gap is structural.

Perps compete on leverage, rebates, and tight spreads. They must keep fees high enough to monetize, but low enough to retain flow.

DEXs charge a fixed toll on every swap. Routing, arbitrage, rebalancing, migrations, and cross-chain flows all pay that toll. They scale on breadth, not leverage.

That’s the real split:

• Perps dominate fee intensity.
• DEXs dominate total cash flow.

Or put simply:

Perps monetize traders.
DEXs monetize the entire ecosystem.