The New Perp DEX Primitive: Get Paid to Trade

The New Perp DEX Primitive is emerging in 2025 as incentive design itself becomes programmable infrastructure inside decentralized finance. In every major market cycle, one protocol quietly redefines the economic primitives beneath decentralized finance.

• In 2020 it was Uniswap, proving that market-making could be democratized through code.
• In 2021 it was Olympus, showing how monetary policy could be encoded into token incentives.
• In 2023 it was GMX, transforming exchange fee-sharing into DeFi’s first sustainable cash-flow model.

Now, in 2025, it may well be Grvt, a perpetual DEX that is turning incentive design itself into a programmable asset class embedded within the verticals that it offers.

At first glance, Grvt looks like yet another exchange. Pause there.

But its underlying mechanism the combination of “paid-to-trade” (-1 bps maker fees) and “paid-to-deposit” (10% APY on trading equity including open margined positions), represents an innovation in how liquidity and users are acquired.

What started as a temporary campaign, “Earn on Equity,” is in practice an experiment in converting marketing spend into unit-economic yield.

The key: It blurs the boundary between user incentive and protocol revenue, suggesting that the next evolution of exchanges may not compete on fees, but on the capital productivity of participation itself.

The New Perp DEX Primitive and the New CAC: Paying Users for Liquidity Twice

Most exchanges subsidize growth by reducing trading costs. Grvt reverses this logic. Its negative maker fee, currently –1 basis point, tiered to as low as –2 bps for high-volume traders, pays liquidity providers directly for adding depth.

Its 5.5 bps taker fee is standard, dropping as volume increases. But the real differentiation is the second layer of payment: the 10% annualized yield on total account equity including open margined positions introduced through Earn on Equity.

The program compounds yield every four hours, pays out weekly, and applies to both idle balances and active margin. Eligibility scales with trading activity:

• 1 completed trade unlocks up to $1,000 of yield-bearing equity.
• 3 trades unlock $20,000 cap.
• 10 trades unlock $100,000 cap.

Beyond the clever gamification, this design rewires the cold-start mechanics of an exchange. Instead of rewarding only order-flow, Grvt rewards retention of capital itself.

It transforms idle collateral, traditionally dead weight in perpetual markets, into an asset that earns. In effect, every trader becomes both a liquidity provider and a depositor, collapsing the distinction between AMM LPs and order-book participants.

Here’s an example: A qualified user maintaining $100,000 in equity through the 24-day campaign window (October 10–November 3, 2025) would earn roughly $657 in interest, 10% × $100k × (24/365).

This is a user-acquisition cost paid in yield rather than token emissions. Instead of subsidizing transactions ex-post (via points), Grvt internalizes CAC as an on-chain interest expense that directly deepens its balance sheet.

The Dual-Yield Architecture Behind the New Perp DEX Primitive

Why does this matter? Because it merges two previously distinct incentive channels: flow and float.

The flow layer (maker rebates) drives order book depth, narrowing spreads and improving price discovery classically a short-term liquidity attractor. The float layer (Earn on Equity) anchors capital on-platform, ensuring that once liquidity arrives, it stays long enough to be monetized by the user, while ensuring that liquidity remains deep.

Together, they form what could be called a dual-yield architecture: a self-reinforcing loop where traders are rewarded for both contributing and committing capital.

If Uniswap V3 optimized capital efficiency per trade, Grvt optimizes user efficiency per dollar of retention.

This dual-yield structure also hints at a new class of DeFi assets: exchange-native “productive balances.” In the same way that Lido turned idle ETH into stETH, Grvt effectively turns idle USDT or USDC into exchange-productive capital earning yield, accruing points, and generating fees simultaneously.

Market Context for the New Perp DEX Primitive

The timing of this experiment is not accidental. The perpetual DEX landscape has entered a mature, zero-sum phase.

• HyperliquidX – $HYPE – dominates by liquidity breadth (187 contract pairs) and fill quality, already post-TGE and focusing on ecosystem retention.
• Lighter has triggered a zero-fee arms race (0/0 maker-taker) but fees are embedded in spreads.
• EdgeX_exchange is scaling rapidly in Asia, but its rewards are getting farmed more.
• Aster – $ASTER – experiments with compounded balance yield (3–6.2%), yet without vault integrations.

Against this backdrop:

• Grvt sits at #5 on DefiLlama’s perps ranking
• $1.1–1.5 billion in 24-hour volume
• $23–24 billion over 30 days a tenfold increase since mid-2025
• Raised $33 million to date
• Expanded its airdrop allocation to 22%
• Possible Q1 2026 TGE

The exchange’s trajectory mirrors a familiar Web3 pattern: early mercenary growth, followed by a search for defensibility. Grvt’s bet is that defensibility comes from embedded yield, not liquidity mining alone.

The Economics of the New Perp DEX Primitive: Paying to Deposit

There’s a fine line between incentive and subsidy. The sustainability of Grvt’s model depends on whether the yield acts as a transient marketing expense or a self-funded yield loop.

Assuming 10,000 users qualify for the top-tier $100k bracket, the protocol would owe about $6.5 million in total interest across the campaign period a modest burn relative to exchange incentives.

That yield can be offset internally by:

• Taker fees (5.5 → 2.0 bps)
• Funding-rate differentials
• Vault and LP returns
• Token emissions under the 22% community allocation

By conditioning yield on trading activity, Grvt converts passive depositors into active users, increasing effective LTV and amortizing CAC through usage.

Broader Implications

What Grvt is experimenting with has implications beyond perpetual futures. It represents a new frontier where incentive design becomes protocol infrastructure, where yield is not an afterthought.

Historically, centralized exchanges treated fee structures as static; DeFi exchanges treated incentives as external. Grvt collapses the two, embedding reward logic directly into the market’s clearing layer. The result is a system where the cost of capital, depth of liquidity, and velocity of volume are all governed by code-driven feedback loops.

This is part of a larger macro trend: the convergence of DeFi primitives and balance-sheet mechanics. In the same way that stablecoin issuers transformed idle reserves into yield-generating treasuries, exchanges are now learning to monetize and return the time value of their own liquidity base.

If this architecture proves durable, it could define the next era of exchange competition: not a race to zero fees, but a race to positive-sum participation, where users earn yield simply by being the liquidity that others need.

Closing Perspective

Grvt’s innovation is an experimental monetary policy implemented at the protocol level. By paying traders to both arrive and stay, Grvt transforms marketing expense into balance-sheet growth, and speculative farming into participatory ownership.

Its early metrics $1B+ daily volume, $33M raised, 22% community allocation, and a defined Q1 2026 TGE give credibility to what might otherwise seem like reflexive hype. Yet the more profound story is architectural: the blending of yield, liquidity, and acquisition into a single programmable loop.

If Uniswap pioneered capital efficiency for assets, Grvt is pioneering capital efficiency for users. In doing so, it hints at what the next generation of DeFi infrastructure might look like: exchanges where incentives aren’t a marketing cost but a structural property where liquidity is not just traded, but earned.