Simply put, @Aster_DEX is building Aster Chain to address the fact that current public blockchains are not suitable for large-scale and professional trading. The on-chain order books are essentially naked; you can see how much position someone is taking, at what price, and when they enter the market. Bots and big players can see the results, leading to front-running, targeted attacks, and slippage eating up all the profits. This makes it almost unusable for institutions and large funds. The first thing Aster Chain aims to solve is hiding your trades, using zero-knowledge and privacy technologies to prevent others from seeing your positions and order details, while still maintaining verifiability. It’s like turning on-chain DEXs into dark pools, making funds safer and transactions cleaner.

2️⃣ Speed and cost are also critical. For perpetual contracts, slow and expensive transactions are deadly. General-purpose public chains have to support many scenarios; DEXs are just one of them. Aster Chain is specifically designed for trading, targeting high TPS, low Gas fees, and millisecond-level execution, making the experience closer to CEXs rather than waiting half a day for a trade with unstable fees.

3️⃣ It’s a matter of trade-offs. Aster doesn’t aim to do everything on this chain. It’s not trying to be a universal public chain but focuses solely on one thing: perfecting decentralized trading, including privacy orders, high leverage, professional trading modes, and deep integration with the ASTER token, staking, and governance—without spreading its efforts thin.

Essentially, it’s about reducing MEV and front-running. By using dedicated execution environments combined with hidden orders, it aims to keep MEV very low or nearly nonexistent, allowing genuine traders—not bots—to profit. This is the experience many professional traders have been seeking but haven’t been able to get on existing chains.

If you keep trading on someone else’s chain, your fees, execution environment, and asset efficiency are all controlled by others. Building your own L1, Aster can integrate Gas, protocol revenue, and collateral systems, such as directly using yield-bearing assets like asBNB and USDF as collateral to improve capital utilization, making the protocol more independent.

Overall, controlling the underlying layer allows Aster to compete in the Perp DEX space. Aster aims to differentiate itself through privacy and performance, striving to become the ultimate Perp DEX. Currently, Aster Chain is still in testing; in the short term, it will run parallel with multiple chains, but the direction is already clear. @cz_ Has the Aster public chain testnet been launched? I already qualify to experience it.