In the past few weeks, the DEX landscape of the Aptos ecosystem is being completely rewritten by a newcomer.

That's right, I am talking about Hyperion. A hybrid DEX that has only been live for 3 months and has not yet issued tokens, is overwhelming established competitors—Thala, LiquidSwap, and Cellana Finance—at an astonishing speed.

I have looked into DefiLlama's latest data, and Hyperion's total trading volume in the past 7 days reached $448 million, not only firmly ranking first among Aptos DEXs, but also increasing by +51.63%. In comparison, Thala dropped by 52% during the same period, while Cellana plummeted by nearly 96%. Data doesn't lie, the landscape is being reshaped.

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Why can't the three major established projects withstand Hyperion's fierce attack?

Let's take a look at the trump cards of the competitors:

  • Thala: A comprehensive DeFi protocol providing AMM + stablecoins, with governance token $THL already launched, TVL reaches $162M, making it one of the largest projects in Aptos by TVL. The 24h trading volume is only $32M, with a drop of over 50% in 7 days, indicating that although a lot of funds are locked, active users are quietly disappearing.

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  • LiquidSwap: An Aptos native AMM built by Pontem, which once had over a million users and billions of dollars in trading volume. It has no native token, and its development has become conservative, with only $800,000 in trading volume in the last 24 hours.

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  • Cellana Finance: A community DEX supported by the Ve(3,3) model, focusing on locking assets + voting governance incentives. But the current price of Token $CELL is visible to all, with liquidity and activity declining significantly.

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So what is Hyperion relying on?

  • Not relying on airdrops and empty promises, but a combination of product design + user growth.

1️⃣ Advanced mechanism: Hyperion adopts a hybrid mechanism of CLMM + Orderbook, i.e., concentrated liquidity + order matching, satisfying professional market making while enhancing the trading experience for ordinary users.

2️⃣ Comprehensive incentives: The DRIPs points system covers trading, market making, inviting, and content creation, making it the most comprehensive growth-oriented incentive mechanism on Aptos currently.

3️⃣ User-oriented: Hyperion focuses on incentives for 'usage behavior'—which means the project values user contributions more than pure locking, making it healthier.

How exactly to play? I have written a detailed practical tutorial, feel free to check it out 👉https://x.com/AirdropAlchemis/status/1918347942748131837

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Not the number one in TVL, but the DEX that is truly being 'used'.

  • As of May 21, Hyperion's TVL is $73.41M, ranking 6th in the entire Aptos ecosystem, only behind Thala ($162.31M) and Cellana ($48.39M) among DEXs. At first glance, it is still far from being the protocol with the most locked assets.

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  • But if we look at trading volume—over the past 7 days, Hyperion's transaction volume reached $448M, which is 2.4 times that of Thala and nearly 180 times that of Cellana.

In other words, while more projects have locked more money, these funds have not been utilized; whereas Hyperion's funds have generated real transactions and fees through high-frequency flows, demonstrating strong activity and capital utilization.

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Comparison chart of TVL vs Volume utilization rates

This is the more essential adoption signal in the DeFi world: it's not about how much is locked, but how much is used. TVL is a savings book, while Volume is a cash flow statement. One has money, and the other knows how to use money; users are voting for Hyperion with their actual behavior.

Every chain's DeFi will go through a round of power replacement.

  • Solana from Serum to Jupiter;

  • Arbitrum from Sushi to Uniswap V3 to Camelot;

  • Aptos, now it's Hyperion's turn.

Of course, the battle is not over, TGE has not happened yet, but the trend is clear: Hyperion is becoming the new core of DeFi on Aptos.