Perps on Sui: What Five Leading Teams Revealed

Main Takeaways

• Perps let traders go long or short with leverage and no expiry. Sui brought five leading teams together for a livestream to compare how they’re building perps.
• Aftermath, Astros, Bluefin, FlowX, and Zo walked through their design choices, what problems they’re solving, and where they see perps heading.
• One theme stood out: Sui’s speed and architecture let builders pursue designs that typically aren’t feasible on other chains.

Overview

Perps have quickly become one of the most competitive areas of DeFi, with teams racing to improve execution, liquidity, and user experience. Sui is emerging as the chain where teams can really push the design space forward. That’s why we brought five leading builders together for a dedicated livestream: Aftermath, Astros, Bluefin, FlowX, and Zo. 

Across an hour-long discussion, they compared approaches, explained design decisions, and showed how differently perps can look when built on Sui’s high-performance infrastructure. In this blog, we highlight the explanations and moments worth revisiting from our Perps on Sui livestream. 

What Are Perps?

Before we jump into the highlights, here’s a quick explainer.

Perpetual futures — or “perps” — let traders go long (if they think the price will rise) or short (if they think it will fall) without owning the underlying asset. Unlike traditional futures, they have no expiry, so positions can remain open as long as margin requirements are met. Traders use them to hedge or express a view on the market, but because perps support leverage, even small moves can lead to outsized gains or losses.

On Sui, teams are exploring a range of models, including fully onchain matching, oracle-based execution, and cross-venue aggregation. That variety is exactly why we brought these teams together: to compare approaches and what Sui unlocks for them.

Aftermath: Fully Onchain Perps; No Gatekeepers

The livestream opened with Airtx from Aftermath explaining their fully onchain approach. 

Most perp platforms use a hybrid model — matching trades offchain and settling them onchain. Aftermath flips this: every order, update, and fill runs through Sui’s validators. “The rules are governed by the validators,” Airtx said. “Rules that can’t be changed.”

The decision comes from Aftermath’s own experience of market-making on hybrid systems. “The API becomes the choke point,” Airtx said. “You have your set market makers who kind of have preference . . . and there are timing games you can play.”

By moving matching fully onchain, Aftermath aims to remove gatekeepers and open liquidity provision. “Anyone can have access to the book, and that creates thicker books.” Sui’s architecture — especially parallel execution and storage rebates — is what made this viable. “These things all added up to being a really, really good design,” Airtx explained.

Astros: Perps Powered by Lending Liquidity

Astros was represented by Jerry, who explained that the project grew out of Navi, one of the largest lending protocols on Sui. Users had idle collateral, liquidity was scattered across assets, and capital efficiency was limited. 

That led to Astros: a perps platform built directly on top of a lending layer.

By connecting to Navi, Astros can automatically borrow against deposited assets when users open a position. “We needed a more unified and efficient capital layer,” Jerry said.

This is especially useful when users want to hedge without touching their lending deposits. “Markets are volatile,” Jerry explained. “Perps become the best destination for them to protect their positions.”

The result is an onchain “prime brokerage model”: one shared pool of collateral that earns lending yield and backs perp trading. Instead of shifting funds between platforms, users get a single, highly efficient base for trading and risk management.

Bluefin: A Perps Platform Built for Traders of Every Level

Bluefin was represented by Rabeel, who explained that the team has spent years refining perpetuals. While perps remain the core product, Bluefin has also added spot, swaps, and automated vault strategies — all feeding into a “full-stack” trading platform.

Risk management is central to Bluefin. “Nothing has happened on our platform in the last four years, and we want to make sure nothing happens going forward,” Rabeel said. 

That’s why Bluefin uses a simple collateral model — USDC only — instead of integrating lending collateral. “There are challenges when you integrate,” he explained, noting risks like falling collateral value, and users taking on more leverage than they realise.

Rabeel also noted that perps naturally serve a smaller audience than spot markets. “The number of perps traders is an order of magnitude lower than spot,” he said, which is why Bluefin focuses on making the path from spot to derivatives as smooth as possible.

As he put it: “How do we make the funnel as big as possible?” 

FlowX: Aggregating Perps Across Ecosystems

FlowX was represented by Neville, who shared that FlowX is building a perps aggregator: a single interface that routes users to the best available price across multiple venues. 

The current beta version integrates Hyperliquid, a perps exchange outside Sui, with plans to add Sui-native perps next. Neville’s reasoning: different perps platforms have different fees, funding rates, and liquidity depths. Leverage amplifies those differences. “Everything in your plan is multiplied,” he noted, so even small differences matter.

FlowX’s goal is to remove the burden of manually checking each venue. By default, it routes orders to the cheapest venue based on total execution cost, though users can choose manually. “By default, we choose the cheaper one,” Neville explained.

The focus now, Neville said, is on next steps such as improving user insights and refining the trading flow as FlowX scales towards multi-venue support.

Zo: Near-Zero Slippage Perps, Powered by Oracle Pricing

Zo was represented by Theo, who outlined the core idea: near-zero slippage execution.

Instead of matching trades through an order book, Zo uses real-time oracle prices, meaning trades execute directly against a price feed rather than moving an order book. “You’re just matching against a price source,” Theo said.

But this comes with challenges. If oracle prices lag in fast markets, traders may try to exploit the delay. “Some traders take advantage of a price move they see elsewhere.” To protect the system, Zo now adds guardrails like minimum holding times and extra fees for high-frequency trading, reducing the chance of someone gaming short-lived gaps.

Theo also highlighted an upcoming AI trading assistant, which can help users generate charts, analyse indicators, and eventually automate strategies when conditions are met. 

The goal, he said, is to make perps more accessible, especially for traders who want predictable execution without worrying about order-book depth or slippage.

What Builders Really Think About Perps on Sui

After the individual spotlights, the discussion opened into a wider debate. The teams compared trade-offs around oracle latency, isolated vs cross-margining, onchain vs offchain matching, and how much complexity a perps engine should expose to the user.

But one theme stood out: Sui gives these teams room to ship designs that are hard to pull off elsewhere. Onchain matching that keeps up with volatility. Lending-integrated collateral that stays efficient. Cross-chain perp aggregation. Zero-slippage execution.

Under the hood, these advantages come from Sui’s architecture: transaction parallelism that keeps up with volatility, low-latency execution for real-time markets, and storage economics that make fully onchain systems viable. Together, these let teams ship models that would be difficult to run at scale on most chains.

As more teams experiment with these models, the opportunity is clear: Sui gives perp builders the freedom to innovate, resulting in faster, more diverse opportunities for traders.

Watch the livestream here for the full discussion and debate.