Decentralized perpetual exchange Aster has officially launched its mainnet, a Layer 1 blockchain dedicated to derivatives trading.
Deployment follows a step-by-step structure. Chain Genesis is live now, with a partnership announcement scheduled for March 18th. moreover, $ASTER Token holders will arrive later this week, with broader ecosystem expansion expected to follow.
What is an aster chain?
According to the team, Aster Chain supports 100,000 transactions per second, 50ms block time, and no gas fees. Cross-chain deposits are supported from $BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Solana.
Chains also have default privacy. All transactions are routed through a one-time stealth address and orders are encrypted using zero-knowledge proofs.
“Account privacy is turned on by default. Your transactions are settled on-chain, but no one can see them. They are still verifiable, but not everyone is able to do so,” the announcement reads. “Want to prove what you did? Generate a viewer pass, which decrypts the on-chain records of the person you share with. No one else can access it. Stay safe.”
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$ASTER Token rally to counter volume decline
The launch received public support from Binance co-founder Qiao Changpeng (CZ), whose family office YZi Labs is backing Astor.
This is a big deal. Trade with privacy. Aster chain. https://t.co/pkEQdLBK0J
— CZ 🔶 $BNB (@cz_binance) March 17, 2026
This announcement also caused the token to rise. $ASTER Yesterday, the altcoin reached an intraday high of $0.79, its highest price since mid-January 2026. At the time of writing, the altcoin was back down to $0.74, up 0.062% on the day.
$ASTER Token price performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
The new launch comes amid reduced activity on the platform. According to DefiLlama, weekly perpetual trading volume peaked at $76.6 billion in October 2025 and has since declined to around $18 billion, a contraction of more than 76%.
Total value locked (TVL) has also decreased from over $2 billion to approximately $949 million at the time of writing.
Aster Perp Volume and TVL. Source: Defilama
While Aster remains one of the top persistent decentralized exchanges by trading volume, this decline reflects increasing competitive pressure from Hyperliquid as the broader on-chain derivatives market consolidates beyond the 2025 breakout period.
The post Aster DEX launches privacy layer 1 as trading volume drops 76% from peak first appeared on BeInCrypto.
