Gate News: On March 18, the decentralized derivatives platform Aster officially launched its Layer-1 blockchain, Aster Chain, designed specifically for perpetual contract trading, emphasizing high performance and privacy protection. The mainnet is currently in the genesis phase, with ecosystem partner information announced simultaneously. The ASTER token staking feature is expected to be available later this week.
According to official disclosures, Aster Chain supports up to 100,000 TPS, with a block time of approximately 50 milliseconds, and features zero gas fees. The network natively supports cross-chain asset deposits from BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana. Additionally, the chain defaults to privacy mechanisms, processing each transaction through a one-time stealth address and encrypting orders with zero-knowledge proofs, enabling a “verifiable but invisible” on-chain interaction mode.
In terms of architecture, Aster emphasizes account-level privacy protection, allowing users to generate “view passes” to selectively disclose transaction data, balancing privacy and compliance. This design differentiates it in the fields of decentralized derivatives trading and privacy computing.
Driven by the mainnet launch and market expectations, the price of ASTER surged briefly, reaching $0.79—its highest since mid-January 2026—before falling back to around $0.74. However, there is a divergence between the price increase and the platform’s fundamentals. Data shows that its weekly perpetual contract trading volume has dropped from a peak of $76.6 billion in October 2025 to about $18 billion, a decline of over 76%. Total value locked (TVL) has also fallen from over $2 billion to approximately $949 million.
Although Aster remains a leading player in the decentralized perpetual contract space, the cooling of the on-chain derivatives market has put ongoing pressure on it from competitors like Hyperliquid. Analysts believe that whether Aster Chain can attract new liquidity through its high performance and privacy features will be key to its next phase of growth.
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