For years, Ethereum has been at the forefront of decentralized finance, pioneering on-chain financial tools like lending protocols and tokenized assets. However, the rapid growth of perpetual futures, also known as 'perps', has largely occurred on other platforms, such as Hyperliquid and Solana. This is because perpetuals require extremely fast, low-cost, and high-frequency trading, which Ethereum's base layer was not designed to optimize.
As a result, layer-2 networks like Arbitrum have become increasingly important, offering a compromise between Ethereum's security and improved trading performance. While some argue that Ethereum's fragmentation across multiple ecosystems is a challenge, others see it as an opportunity for the network to focus on its role as a settlement and collateral layer, underpinning the deeper liquidity and more mature DeFi primitives that support the perpetual futures market.