For years, Ethereum has been at the forefront of decentralized finance, pioneering on-chain financial tools and tokenized assets. However, the rapid growth of perpetual futures, also known as 'perps,' has largely occurred on other platforms.
This is because perps 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 and Base have become the go-to destinations for perps trading, offering a compromise between Ethereum's security and improved trading performance. While Solana and Hyperliquid have also gained traction in the perps market, Ethereum's layer-2 ecosystem is increasingly positioning itself as the settlement and collateral layer that underpins these markets. Proponents argue that Ethereum's role is evolving, rather than diminishing, as it focuses on providing the deepest and most trusted place to settle perps, rather than trying to become the fastest place to trade them.