Aster This Year: From Staking Protocol to Public Chain, Leonard and His Three Bets All In

Most crypto projects take a year to prove they can survive, but Aster changed faces three times in a year.

Twelve months ago, this name did not exist. Its predecessor Astherus was doing well on the BNB Chain at the time, with funding from YZi Labs, running a stable staking product with users and revenue. Growing TVL, launching tokens, getting listed — a ready-made path lay ahead.

CEO Leonard and the team chose a different path. They willingly said goodbye to Astherus, revamped the product line and strategic direction as a whole, merged with APX Finance, and started anew.

Three transformations, each faster than the last. Looking back over these twelve months, "speed" itself is the most distinctive mark on Aster.

Three Transformations

The day Leonard made the decision to bid farewell to Astherus, he said it required immense determination.

At that time, Astherus was already the largest yield platform on the BNB Chain, with a token launch plan in place. To set aside a proven model and venture into an entirely new direction, there were hesitations within the team.

But a set of data convinced Leonard: the on-chain perpetual contract trading volume was systematically surpassing that of mainstream centralized exchanges. Perp DEX had evolved from a niche experiment into infra selected with real money. Staking protocols earn management fees with limited space; trading platforms earn trading volume with space depending on how much funds are willing to stay on the chain. The imaginative possibilities of the two businesses were on a different scale.

The team was not starting from scratch either. One of Aster's predecessors, ApolloX, had accumulated years of technical and risk control experience in the perpetual contract trading field, always waiting for the right moment to unleash these reserves.

The merger of Astherus and APX Finance, from assessment to execution in a matter of weeks, officially unveiled the new brand Aster. This was the first transformation.

The second transformation came even faster. In June 2025, CZ tweeted, "It's time to do a dark pool DEX."

The industry discussed it, some wrote analytical articles, some issued research reports, and some began to create PPTs. Twenty days later, Aster directly launched the Hidden Order feature: the order's size, price, and direction are all encrypted and not visible before matching. Users could trade the finished product with real money on the same day.

The outside world is amazed by this speed. But privacy transactions have long been a topic of discussion within Aster.

Leonard said that Perp DEX has a core issue that has never been resolved: all transactions are transparently visible on-chain, transaction signals are easily exposed, and strategies are easily tracked and replicated. To put it bluntly, when you open a large position on-chain, everyone can see your holdings and liquidation price, and your strategy is essentially posted on the wall. After repeated communication with the team and multiple institutions and senior traders, the feedback was highly consistent: large funds are waiting for a sufficiently secure on-chain environment. The current situation of full position transparency has kept many funds that should have been on-chain on the sidelines.

The hidden order price is a solution that the team has long been working on. The significance of CZ's tweet was to validate the market timing. Leonard said, "When CZ tweeted about the relevant need, we realized that market education had matured and the time was right." The team immediately accelerated the launch and continued to iterate.

The logic of the third pivot is also very clear. After the hidden order price went live, the team discovered an even greater opportunity: if privacy could be built into the underlying layer of the chain, the value that could be unlocked would far exceed improvements at the application layer. However, on someone else's chain, the consensus mechanism and execution logic cannot be deeply customized. For example, working in a furnished office space is sufficient, but to create a truly customized headquarters, you need to design the blueprint yourself.

What Aster aims to achieve is default encryption: your position is encrypted by default, and you need to actively operate to make it public. This logic must be written at the very bottom layer of the chain, which cannot be done on someone else's general-purpose chain. In March 2026, the Aster Chain mainnet went live. With 50-millisecond block time, over 100,000 TPS, and zero gas fees. ZK-Proving and Stealth Address architecture ensure that every transaction is automatically private, while every private transaction is verifiable.

Performance and privacy usually need to be carefully balanced, as running zero-knowledge proofs is computationally intensive. Aster's solution is to deeply customize the entire chain from the consensus mechanism to the execution layer for the derivatives trading scenario specifically, rather than being a general-purpose chain. They leave the general-purpose nature to others and, in return, achieve excellence in their own field.

In just one year, a staking protocol, a perpetual contract exchange, and a public chain—three identities, each larger in scale than the previous one.

Four Cards and the Next Move

The core design concept of Aster Chain is default encryption: your position is encrypted by default, and you need to actively operate to make it public. This logic is written at the very bottom layer of the chain, which cannot be done on someone else's general-purpose chain.

The chain's parameters are deeply customized for the trading scenario: with 50-millisecond block time, over 100,000 TPS, and zero gas fees. The ZK-Proving and Stealth Address architecture ensure that every transaction is automatically private, while every private transaction is verifiable. Performance and privacy usually need to be carefully balanced, as running zero-knowledge proofs is computationally intensive. Aster's solution is to specialize the entire chain from the consensus mechanism to the execution layer for derivatives trading, rather than being a general-purpose chain. They leave the general-purpose nature to others and, in return, achieve excellence in their own field.

The first card, Default Privacy. Many projects in the industry focus on privacy, but almost all of them simply add a toggle switch for users. Aster, on the other hand, has encryption as the default state, allowing users to decide who can view their data through the Viewer Pass mechanism. The difference in approach is deeper than the difference in functionality.

The second card, Cross-category Trading. In the Perp DEX arena, Aster was the first to offer stock perpetual contracts. Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, with leverage of up to 20x, settled in USDT, and available for trading 24/7. Furthermore, it also supports trading pairs for recent popular assets like precious metals and oil, providing a platform that covers mainstream cryptocurrencies, meme coins, stocks, and commodities.

The third card, Trading as Staking. The foundation accumulated during the Astherus era has played a unique role in the transition. USDF yield-stablecoins used as contract collateral can also generate returns, with a portion of the fees automatically reinvested in USDF. While others start from scratch in their transition, Aster's transition builds upon the accumulation of the previous generation.

The fourth card, Ecosystem Position. Fully funded by YZi Labs, multiple public interactions with CZ, and a CMC Launch first-phase project. Deeply rooted in the BNB ecosystem, each wave of ecosystem growth naturally reaps dividends.

Leonard believes that the Perp DEX arena will ultimately move towards concentration among the leaders: "It is very likely that in the future, a structure dominated by the top three players will form, and for DEXs, this concentration may be even higher."

Liquidity naturally converges towards the top players in the business, and DEXs have no geographical restrictions, with global users facing the same liquidity pool. Those who can maintain a leading position in the long term are those deeply rooted in a core value.

Aster has chosen privacy as its direction.

"The scale of on-chain transactions will eventually surpass that of centralized exchanges," Leonard said, "and the privacy of transactions is a key driver of this shift." The core concern of institutional funds staying in CEXs is the public transparency of position information. Once on-chain transactions can provide reliable privacy protection, there is a reason for the massive waiting funds to enter.

Currently, Aster is collaborating with partners from both the Web2 and Web3 sides to drive implementation. On the Web3 side, stablecoin projects and prediction markets are in discussions, as users of prediction markets and Perp DEX traders have a high degree of overlap, leaving ample room for synergistic growth. On the Web2 side, financial companies are most interested in establishing markets on Aster or listing assets, as this is their most natural entry point.

In terms of cross-chain, Aster is not eager to expand to more native chains, but is more focused on cross-chain solutions. Leonard's judgment is: "This cycle has proved that we don't need so many L1s, L2s; in the future, liquidity and users will concentrate on a few chains."

The Next Chapter of Aster Speed

For most crypto projects, the one-year anniversary is marked by a commemorative tweet.

On Aster's one-year anniversary, behind it are the results of three transformations: its own chain, its own privacy architecture, its own full-category transaction system.

The discussion in the Perp DEX track cannot avoid Aster, because every time it appears, it comes with a completed product.

Leonard's only goal set for the next year is: to continue improving the transaction experience, optimizing depth, enhancing large trade execution capabilities, so that traders feel for the first time on-chain, "this is better than a centralized exchange."

Looking at what this team has accomplished in the past twelve months, you can probably guess that what they refer to as "one thing" will certainly turn out to be more than one thing in the end.

Aster's one-year anniversary. Aster speed has only completed the first chapter.