1. Industry Status and Overview

Throughout the development of global capital markets, leveraged trading has been a crucial tool for promoting liquidity and efficient risk pricing. From the pioneering launch of Contracts for Difference (CFDs) by IG Group in the 1970s to the rise of internet platforms like Robinhood and Plus 500 in the 21st century, leveraged trading has gradually transitioned from an institutional monopoly to widespread adoption. Leveraging financial derivatives such as margin trading, options, and futures, investors can leverage larger market exposure with smaller amounts of capital, thereby amplifying returns while also assuming higher risks.

Over the past 50 years, traditional financial leveraged trading platforms have accumulated extensive experience in product coverage, user experience, and regulatory compliance, gradually establishing a highly mature business model. However, amid the rapid evolution of digital finance and blockchain technology, the underlying limitations of this system have become increasingly apparent. The rise of Web 3 aims to address these limitations. Looking back at the evolution of traditional finance, its success lies in standardized and widespread product design, continuous optimization of user experience, and the backing of regulatory compliance. IG Group offers over 19,000 tradable instruments across multiple markets, including stocks, forex, and commodities, embodying a comprehensive coverage strategy. Plus 500 has rapidly gained a user base with over 2,800 CFDs and a compliant listing on the London Stock Exchange. Robinhood, with its zero commission and mobile-friendly experience, has attracted a large number of Gen Z investors, bringing leveraged trading, a traditional financial tool, to the masses. These platforms, through their multi-regional regulatory licenses, have secured investor trust and laid the foundation for the entire industry.

However, the deeper problems of this model have been magnified in the digital financial era. First and foremost is the risk of centralization. All traditional platforms are based on a structure of fund custody and centralized clearing, requiring users to entrust their funds to the platform for management. During the 2021 GME incident, Robinhood restricted user buying access due to liquidation pressure, directly impacting trading freedom and exposing the risk that centralized platforms can change their rules at any time. The collapse of MF Global in 2011 further highlighted counterparty risk. When the platform used customer margin to maintain liquidity, investors suffered significant losses. Secondly, there is a lack of transparency. Traditional platforms lack public mechanisms for order matching, risk hedging, and price discovery. Investors cannot confirm whether the platform is engaging in "betting against" behavior and can only passively rely on publicly disclosed information. This black-box operation exacerbates information asymmetry and undermines market fairness.

Furthermore, restrictions on fund custody mean investors lack autonomy over their assets. If a platform goes bankrupt, is hacked, or is frozen by regulators, user funds are often difficult to recover. When crude oil futures plummeted to negative values in 2020, some platforms experienced large-scale margin calls due to delays in clearing, resulting in losses shared by both the platforms and their users. This demonstrates the structural fragility of centralized clearing mechanisms in extreme market conditions. Regulatory barriers are another major limitation of traditional platforms. Policy restrictions on leveraged trading vary across markets. For example, Europe limits retail forex trading to 30x leverage, while some emerging markets have relatively looser regulations. This prevents users from enjoying equal access to financial services globally. Furthermore, the high cost of maintaining compliance licenses is ultimately passed on to users in the form of higher spreads, fees, and minimum deposit thresholds, further limiting widespread participation.

These structural limitations present an opportunity for Web 3. Unlike traditional models, Web 3 leverages blockchain and smart contracts to reshape the underlying logic of leveraged trading. First, the self-custodial model mitigates centralization risks, allowing users to complete transactions directly through their wallets without relying on the platform's reputation. Second, all matching and clearing logic is publicly verifiable on-chain, reducing information asymmetry and enabling investors to audit trading rules in real time. Furthermore, assets no longer need to be held in platform accounts; instead, they are held by users themselves, reducing the risk of bankruptcy and liquidation. Geographical barriers are also significantly reduced, allowing users with a crypto wallet and internet connection to access global financial services. Web 3 also offers potential solutions to compliance costs, such as modular compliance through DAO governance and protocol-level design, exploring compatibility with regulatory systems in different regions.

As for liquidity crises, decentralized protocols enhance system resilience through mechanisms such as risk sharing in capital pools, partial liquidations, and insurance funds. Therefore, the relationship between traditional financial platforms and Web 3 platforms is not one of complete substitution, but rather one of complementarity and evolution. The success of the former validates the long-term market demand for leveraged trading and fosters mature user habits; the latter complements and reshapes traditional models through technological innovation. In the future, the two are likely to merge to create a new generation of hybrid financial systems: traditional platforms enhance transparency and resilience through the introduction of blockchain technology, while Web 3 platforms leverage the proven models of traditional finance in compliance and user experience to drive their own scale of application.

In summary, the development of traditional financial leverage trading platforms over the past 50 years has provided a trinity model of "compliance + user experience + product coverage," which has validated the market value of financial leverage. However, centralization risk, lack of transparency, fund custody restrictions, regulatory barriers, and liquidation risks have become insurmountable bottlenecks. The rise of blockchain and DeFi addresses these structural issues, proposing new solutions such as self-custody, on-chain verifiability, global accessibility, and dynamic liquidation. In the future, the evolution of leverage trading may no longer be a binary opposition between traditional and emerging, but a leapfrogging integration and development, propelling the financial market to a new stage in risk control, transparency, and inclusiveness.

The value of Web 3 leveraged trading lies not in simply moving traditional leveraged tools onto the blockchain, but in reshaping the derivatives market's operational logic and industry divisions through decentralized transparency and capital efficiency. The ultimate form will be a dual-engine drive: "The mature experience of traditional finance x decentralized transparency and efficiency": on one hand, it will attract professional users with smooth interactions and deep liquidity similar to CEXs; on the other hand, it will reshape the boundaries of trust and compliance with the verifiable rules of smart contracts, self-custody of funds, and global accessibility.

To achieve this end goal, the platform must simultaneously surpass challenges along five dimensions. The first is user experience: matching must be instantaneous, gas costs negligible, and mobile-first. Account abstraction and one-click cross-chain transactions hide complexity behind the scenes, allowing both retail and institutional investors to enter the leveraged market with minimal effort. Second, multi-asset integration: truly integrating crypto assets and RWAs into a single trading canvas: BTC/ETH, along with US stocks, forex, and gold, are managed under a unified margin framework. Positions can be migrated and netted across markets, resulting in more capital-efficient risk engines and margin models. Third, capital reuse: unified collateral, multi-market reuse, and the recycling of pledged assets and stablecoins allow the same collateral to be rolled across lending, staking, and perpetual contracts, amplifying efficiency. Combined with partial liquidation, tiered maintenance margin, and incentive hedging, this not only enhances system resilience but also reduces liquidity noise during extreme moments. Fourth, the compliance path is clarified. Through license acquisition, regulatory sandboxes, and modular KYC/AML, auditable entry and exit channels are provided for institutions and high-net-worth funds, achieving "open and inclusive front-end and optional compliance back-end." In a multi-jurisdictional environment, a structured design of "protocol neutrality and access layer compliance" reduces institutional friction. Fifth, community and ecosystem. DAO governance and token economics are not about "airdrops equal growth." Instead, they link fee sharing, market-making incentives, and risk funds with protocol returns, driving positive competition among LPs, market makers, and strategic parties. Open APIs, oracles, and cross-chain infrastructure connect lending, stablecoins, RWAs, and clearing networks, forming a compounding ecological potential.

Grand View Research predicts that the DeFi market will exceed $231 billion by 2030. If leveraged-related businesses increase their share to 20%–25%, this will create a $50–60 billion market segment. Considering the multi-asset and RWA integration, the actual addressable market still has room for exponential growth. Therefore, Web 3 leveraged trading is at a turning point of "breakthrough and expansion." The product engineering and risk control frameworks accumulated by traditional finance provide a paradigm for on-chain replication and improvement. Decentralized transparency, self-custody, and global accessibility fundamentally alleviate the problems of centralized counterparties, regional barriers, and black boxes. The integration of synthetic assets and RWA will determine the platform's differentiation and ceiling. The profile of the winners is clear: providing professional liquidity with near-CEX performance and mobile experience; maximizing capital efficiency through unified collateralization and cross-market netting; establishing institutional-grade compliance barriers through licenses and sandboxes; and fostering long-term collaboration among LPs, traders, and developers through a tokenized risk-return closed loop. When the convergence of technology and compliance occurs in the coming years, Web 3 leveraged trading will become more than just an online alternative to traditional derivatives; it will become the price and liquidity engine of a new generation of global multi-asset infrastructure. This will be a systematic reconstruction from the trust paradigm to capital turnover efficiency, and a core battleground for the convergence of DeFi and TradFi.

2. Analysis of the Web 3 Leveraged Trading Track

Amid the rapid expansion of decentralized finance, leveraged trading, one of the most attractive and risky financial instruments, is undergoing a new round of restructuring. In the past, centralized exchanges virtually monopolized the derivatives market. However, with the improved performance of the Ethereum ecosystem and various public blockchains, a significant amount of high-frequency trading and leveraged speculation, previously dependent on centralized platforms, is gradually migrating to DeFi. Today, decentralized leveraged trading has formed several major camps, represented by dYdX's order book model, GMX's liquidity pool model, Hyperliquid's high-performance matching model, and Avantis's multi-asset synthetic model. The rise of these platforms has not only fueled the prosperity of the DeFi derivatives market but also demonstrated distinct technological approaches and competitive strategies, laying the groundwork for future landscape evolution.

dYdX is a pioneer in this field, almost completely redefining the possibilities of decentralized leveraged trading by the standards of centralized exchanges. The platform supports over 200 markets, offers leverage up to 50x, and has already surpassed $200 billion in cumulative trading volume. Following its 2024 upgrade to version 4, dYdX will migrate its core matching engine to the Cosmos standalone chain, achieving a fully decentralized order book architecture. This move is considered a landmark transformation. Unlike automated market makers (AMMs), dYdX's order book design provides deep liquidity and lower transaction costs for professional and institutional traders. Its tiered fee structure offers both a zero-entry experience for small-time users and attractive discounts for larger funds. For users relying on high-frequency trading and sophisticated hedging, dYdX's model offers a near-centralized experience while retaining on-chain transparency and self-custody.

However, this model also presents challenges. Order book matching places extremely high demands on chain performance. Even on the Cosmos standalone chain, its speed and stability still struggle to match those of top centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit. Furthermore, the inherent complexity of order book trading raises the learning curve for retail users, making it less intuitive and accessible than the AMM model. Therefore, dYdX's strategic direction is to maintain professional liquidity while continuing to strengthen community governance and user education, gradually establishing its position as a "professional on-chain derivatives exchange."

In contrast, GMX has taken a completely different approach. As a representative platform for DeFi perpetual contracts, GMX's core innovation is the introduction of the GLP liquidity pool mechanism. Platform users form a counterparty relationship with the liquidity pool, which acts as a market maker. Traders open positions on the platform, and their profits and losses are directly linked to the liquidity pool. Supported assets include mainstream tokens such as BTC, ETH, and AVAX, with leverage up to 100x. To date, GMX has accumulated over $235 billion in trading volume and has over 669,000 users. GLP holders share in trading fees and funding rates by assuming counterparty risk, with an annualized yield consistently maintained in the 10%-15% range, making it highly attractive. The innovation of this model lies in its effective reduction of reliance on external liquidity, allowing liquidity providers to naturally function as market makers while also sharing risk across multiple asset pools. However, this model also has structural vulnerabilities: in extreme market conditions, the liquidity pool may incur significant losses, and LPs may face the risk of capital loss. Furthermore, while GMX offers a certain depth of liquidity, price shocks and slippage remain significant during periods of significant volatility. GMX's long-term potential lies in its community-driven token economics, where GMX and GLP holders not only share in profits but also participate in platform governance. This "symbiotic relationship between traders and liquidity providers" strengthens user engagement and drives continued ecosystem expansion.

If dYdX represents the professional "order book" school and GMX the innovative "liquidity pool" school, then Hyperliquid is the "new dominant force," centered around speed and performance. Hyperliquid has quickly captured over 80% of the decentralized perpetual swap market, virtually reshaping the industry landscape. The platform supports over 150 assets, offers a leverage cap of 50x, and boasts sub-second transaction speeds, with performance approaching and even surpassing that of mainstream centralized exchanges. This high-performance matching engine has attracted a large number of high-frequency traders and quantitative funds, who see it as an ideal platform for the decentralized market. Hyperliquid's success lies in precisely addressing the performance gap between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges, offering on-chain transparency and self-custody while maintaining execution speeds comparable to traditional exchanges. However, it also has significant shortcomings. Its product portfolio is still insufficiently diverse, currently focusing almost entirely on perpetual contracts and lacking diversified offerings like options and structured derivatives. Furthermore, its risk control mechanisms have yet to be fully tested in extreme market conditions, and balancing liquidation efficiency and user security in the event of significant market fluctuations remains uncertain. Despite this, Hyperliquid has become a leading example of the "speed" of DeFi derivatives. Future development may focus on expanding into synthetic assets and enhancing cross-chain compatibility, pushing beyond the boundaries of a single product.

Finally, Avantis represents the "cross-border" trend, attempting to directly connect DeFi with traditional financial markets, becoming a pioneer in multi-asset synthetic trading. As the first decentralized leveraged platform supporting both crypto and real-world assets (RWA), Avantis uses USDC as unified collateral, allowing users to simultaneously trade cryptocurrencies, forex, gold, oil, and other assets with leverage up to 500x. This model significantly improves capital efficiency and enables users to hedge and arbitrage across markets on the same platform. For example, users can simultaneously open long BTC and short gold positions, leveraging cross-asset correlations to build more complex strategies. Avantis's technological breakthrough lies in oracle integration and a dynamic liquidation mechanism. It incorporates a loss rebate mechanism and positive slippage protection to balance the interests of liquidity providers and traders. By the end of 2024, the platform had attracted over 2,000 traders and exceeded $100 million in cumulative trading volume. Despite its small size, it holds significant strategic significance: it not only drives product innovation within DeFi but also builds a bridge between crypto and traditional finance. Challenges also exist. On the one hand, Avantis relies heavily on oracles, and any deviations in cross-market price inputs could trigger systemic risks. On the other hand, derivatives trading involving traditional financial assets such as foreign exchange and commodities inevitably faces stricter regulatory scrutiny. This forces Avantis to maintain a delicate balance between compliance and innovation.

Overall, the current landscape of mainstream Web 3 leveraged trading platforms can be summarized as "multipolar." dYdX represents specialization and deep order book liquidity; GMX stands for model innovation and community-driven liquidity pools; Hyperliquid represents extreme performance and speed; and Avantis represents cross-border innovation and multi-asset integration. These platforms are not intended to replace one another, but rather to jointly drive the expansion of the decentralized derivatives market. Their diverse technological paths reflect the diverse development trends of Web 3 in meeting the needs of diverse users: professional traders pursue liquidity and efficiency, retail users prefer simplicity and incentive mechanisms, high-frequency quantitative funds focus on extreme performance, and cross-market investors value multi-asset integration. Future development is likely to be a fusion of these models.

If dYdX-style order book platforms can further improve on-chain performance, they will both compete with and complement Hyperliquid's high-performance model. GMX's liquidity pool mechanism may be adopted by more platforms, but it requires continuous iteration of risk management tools. Avantis's cross-border efforts may inspire more platforms to explore a new narrative of "crypto + traditional assets." Ultimately, whether decentralized margin trading platforms can truly challenge the dominance of centralized exchanges depends on whether they can find a new balance between performance, liquidity, security, and compliance. In other words, the landscape of Web 3 margin trading is rapidly evolving, driven not by a single vision of "decentralization" but by differentiated responses to diverse trading needs, market gaps, and technological bottlenecks. From dYdX's specialization, to GMX's community-building, to Hyperliquid's speed, and Avantis's cross-border expansion, the decentralized derivatives landscape is no longer a matter of single breakthroughs, but rather a multi-pronged approach. In the foreseeable future, these platforms may each dominate their own niche market, or they may push the entire DeFi derivatives market towards a higher scale and maturity through the integration of technology and models.

3. Innovative Mechanisms for Web 3 Leveraged Trading

The innovative mechanism of Web 3 leveraged trading fundamentally reshapes the logic of traditional financial derivatives. It goes beyond simply moving leveraged instruments onto the blockchain. Rather, it establishes a completely new trading and clearing infrastructure based on smart contracts, on-chain transparency, capital reuse, and multi-asset derivative synthesis. This system addresses several key bottlenecks of traditional platforms: fund custody risk, clearing lags, cross-market fund fragmentation, and insufficient transparency, further unlocking the capital efficiency and global accessibility of leveraged trading. Its core innovations lie in three dimensions: First, the on-chain integration of prices and risks. Oracle networks such as Chainlink and Python have become the price foundation of the entire synthetic finance system, capable of updating off-chain prices for foreign exchange, commodities, indices, and crypto assets at sub-second or even millisecond frequencies. Through multi-source aggregation, decentralized node signatures, and outlier trimming mechanisms, they significantly reduce the risks of manipulation and tail shocks. The greatest value derived from this is that synthetic assets can securely and reliably mirror real-world markets on-chain, allowing users to gain price exposure without relying on the black box nature of traditional brokerages or market makers. Second, it innovates clearing and risk management mechanisms. Traditional finance employs "full liquidation," which can easily trigger liquidity stampedes and cascading margin calls in extreme market conditions. Web 3 platforms are designed to incorporate partial liquidations, dynamic margining, and incentive hedging. When the risk profile of individual positions contributes to the overall platform risk balance, traders can receive fee rebates or positive slippage incentives. When risk is excessively concentrated, the system automatically increases funding rates or implements phased position reductions to mitigate market shocks. Furthermore, insurance funds and adaptive funding mechanisms are introduced as safety valves to help absorb tail risks from black swan events. This "dynamic game + risk sharing" model is making the leveraged market more resilient in extreme environments. Thirdly, it represents a leap in capital efficiency. Under traditional models, investors who simultaneously trade forex, gold, and stocks need to maintain separate margin accounts across different platforms, resulting in inefficiencies caused by the accumulation and fragmentation of funds. Web 3 synthetic leverage's unified collateral model allows users to collateralize USDC, ETH, or LST and simultaneously operate BTC perpetuals, XAU synthetics, the US dollar index, or forex positions within a single margin framework. The risk engine increases leverage through correlation conversion and netting, resulting in actual capital utilization rates that can be two to three times higher than traditional models. Simultaneously, the income structure of liquidity providers (LPs) has undergone a fundamental shift, no longer relying solely on market-making spreads. Instead, it comprises a trinity of "transaction fees + funding fees + hedging incentives." This provides superior fund duration and return stability compared to traditional AMM pools, attracting more institutional liquidity injections.

At the strategic level, synthetic leverage is naturally suited for cross-market arbitrage and macro hedging. Users can construct a BTC long + gold short portfolio on the same platform to hedge against inflation risk, or a USD Index long + risk asset short portfolio to mitigate against a strengthening dollar. This combination eliminates the need to transfer funds across platforms and incurs no additional counterparty credit risk, significantly reducing operational friction and time value loss. As cross-chain communication protocols and Layer 2 scaling mature, this integrated experience will expand to a multi-chain ecosystem, enabling secure transmission of price and settlement instructions across different execution layers.

More importantly, the wave of tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) is providing new avenues for synthetic leverage. Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2030, the on-chain scale of RWAs could reach $16 trillion. The on-chain integration of underlying assets like US Treasury bonds, treasury bills, gold, and commodities enables the direct generation of synthetic perpetual and futures-based products without the need for traditional custody and brokerage systems, providing users with standardized leverage tools. For example, Avantis, based on price feeds from Python and Chainlink, integrates foreign exchange, gold, crude oil, and other synthetic assets into its on-chain offerings. Using USDC as unified collateral, users can conduct cross-market transactions within a single matching domain, and a "loss rebate + positive slippage" design dynamically balances trader and limited partner risk. This not only meets the needs of crypto-native users but also opens up access to on-chain derivatives for traditional investors. The demand stratification is also clear. Risk-averse funds prefer to become LPs, seeking stable annualized returns of 10–15% and utilizing hedging modules to mitigate risk exposure. Risk-seeking funds, on the other hand, maximize returns through high leverage and cross-market arbitrage. Platforms cater to diverse user groups through tiered product offerings, thereby expanding market capacity. Longer-term, as account abstraction (AA) and a gas-free experience become widespread, the entry barrier for retail users will be further lowered, driving rapid growth in the user base. From a macro perspective, the innovative mechanisms of Web 3 leverage trading represent not only an upgrade of financial instruments but also a reconstruction of global capital infrastructure. At the price discovery layer, oracles ensure a tight coupling between on-chain and real-world markets; at the risk pricing layer, dynamic liquidation mechanisms and hedging incentives enhance system resilience; and at the capital circulation layer, unified collateralization and fund reuse significantly improve efficiency. The integration of these three key elements enables Web 3 leverage platforms to not only compete with CEXs in trading experience, but also achieve significant improvements in capital efficiency and risk resilience.

Therefore, the ultimate landscape of Web 3 leveraged trading will not be simply an on-chain alternative to traditional derivatives, but a multi-asset, multi-market, globally accessible infrastructure capable of supporting both retail and institutional capital. Whoever can establish a leading advantage in low-latency execution, strong risk control mechanisms, and compliant accessibility will secure market share and valuation premiums for years to come. This is not only a technological competition, but also part of the evolution of financial institutions, and the core battleground for the convergence of DeFi and TradFi.

IV. Conclusion

Web 3 leveraged trading stands at a critical juncture of breakthrough and expansion, its future trajectory determined not only by technological evolution but also by the combined efforts of market and regulatory bodies. Decades of development in traditional finance have amassed extensive experience in product design, risk management models, and compliance systems, providing a crucial framework for DeFi. However, the traditional model's centralized custody, geographical barriers, and high compliance costs make it difficult to meet the demands of globalized and trustless capital flows. Web 3 platforms, leveraging innovative mechanisms such as self-custody, full-chain transparency, and borderless access, are poised to disrupt and reshape leveraged trading, a core financial application requiring high frequency and capital efficiency.

Of even greater strategic significance is the on-chain integration of synthetic assets and RWAs, which is opening up a whole new market space. Integrating US stocks, foreign exchange, and commodities into on-chain derivatives systems will not only meet the professional needs of cross-market arbitrage and hedge funds, but will also provide retail investors with unprecedented opportunities for global asset allocation. Whoever can pioneer a stable oracle mechanism, unified collateralization for capital efficiency, and a compliant and accessible architecture in this field will have the potential to become the next Binance-level platform.

The profile of future winners is becoming increasingly clear: those that can approach or even surpass the smooth front-end experience of CEXs while maintaining decentralized security and transparency in their back-end mechanisms; those that can connect multiple assets and markets while actively exploring regulatory pathways to provide a trusted entry point for institutional capital. As technology matures, user experience improves, and the regulatory framework improves, the market size and strategic importance of Web 3 leveraged trading will rapidly increase. By 2030, this sector is expected to become a core growth engine worth hundreds of billions of dollars, representing not only a revolution in financial derivatives but also a key battleground in the convergence of TradFi and DeFi.