For years, Ethereum has been closely associated with decentralized finance, pioneering financial tools like lending protocols and tokenized assets. However, the rapidly growing sector of perpetual futures, also known as 'perps,' has primarily thrived on other platforms. Traders often associate on-chain perpetuals with Hyperliquid or Solana rather than Ethereum, due to the latter's base layer not being designed to optimize for extremely fast, low-cost, and high-frequency trading. According to AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, 'Perps require frequent transactions, fast execution, and deep liquidity, making them a natural use case for the Arbitrum platform.' The distinction has become increasingly important as decentralized perpetual exchanges mature and attract institutional attention.
Ethereum's security-first architecture has made it an ideal settlement layer, but its block times and gas costs have historically made it an expensive platform for latency-sensitive trading applications.