Cardano Perps Season Is Here, 4 Platforms Are Fighting for DeFi Dominance
Episode by Peter Bui on May 18th, 2026
Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem is entering a new phase as perpetuals and prediction-style markets begin to take shape across multiple platforms.
In this episode, Peter explores why that matters, not just for active traders, but for the broader health of the ecosystem. More perpetual trading can mean more on-chain activity, more fees, and stronger demand for stablecoins, but it also brings sharper risk, especially for users who do not fully understand leverage.
Rather than focusing on a single app, the episode compares four projects now competing for attention: Strike Finance, Atlas, Ascend, and Minute Markets. Each takes a different path into Cardano’s growing derivatives landscape, and together they offer a useful snapshot of where the market may be heading.
Why perpetuals matter on Cardano
Perpetuals let traders speculate on price direction without owning the underlying asset. A trader can go long if they expect price to rise, or short if they expect price to fall. Because these products usually support leverage, users can take positions larger than their initial collateral, increasing both upside potential and downside risk.
Peter gives a clear warning here: leverage is not passive income and it is not beginner-friendly. If the market moves too quickly against a trader, the position can be liquidated. That makes perpetuals powerful, but unforgiving.
Still, the upside for the ecosystem is obvious. If perpetual markets gain traction, Cardano could see more trading volume, more transaction fees, and more reasons for users to keep capital on-chain. Stablecoins become especially important in that environment because they often serve as collateral for leveraged positions.
Strike Finance is the current benchmark
Of the four projects discussed, Strike Finance is the most established. Peter describes it as the platform currently leading the charge, with a live mainnet product and a version-two rollout that expands compatibility beyond Cardano. Strike is already framing itself as a cross-chain derivatives venue, with Ethereum support live and Solana reportedly on the way.
That matters because it gives Strike a head start in both product maturity and market awareness. The platform already offers the familiar trading workflow users expect from a perpetuals venue: connect a wallet, choose a market, size a position, and manage risk through collateral adjustments and order controls.
Peter also points to supporting features beyond trading itself, including vaults and staking options. That broader product surface could help Strike retain users who want more than a single speculative trade. In a competitive field, being first is useful, but being reliable and flexible is more important.
Atlas is tackling Cardano’s stablecoin fragmentation
Atlas stands out because it is trying to solve a structural problem in Cardano DeFi rather than simply launching another leverage venue. Peter highlights the ecosystem’s fragmented stablecoin liquidity as one of the biggest bottlenecks for efficient trading. Capital is spread across multiple dollar-pegged assets, which can lead to thinner pools and worse execution.
According to Peter’s summary of the project, Atlas is taking a stablecoin-first approach with a unified liquidity model. Instead of isolating liquidity across separate pools, the platform aims to treat available stablecoin collateral more like a shared base layer for trading. If it works as intended, that could improve capital efficiency and make the overall market more usable.
This is one of the more important themes in the episode. Cardano does not just need more leverage products. It needs deeper, more practical liquidity. Peter’s argument is that a platform that helps make stablecoins more useful could have ecosystem-wide impact, especially if it draws more capital into DeFi rather than merely redistributing the same liquidity across new interfaces.
Ascend blends perpetuals, prediction markets, and privacy
Ascend is the most distinctive project in the group. Rather than focusing only on standard asset perpetuals, it combines leveraged market views with prediction-style trading. Users are not simply trading whether an asset rises or falls over time, they are also trading probabilities around specific outcomes.
What makes Ascend more notable is its privacy angle. Peter says the project is built using zero-knowledge infrastructure tied to Midnight, which could give traders more protection than fully transparent on-chain systems. In public markets, wallet behavior can often be observed directly. A privacy-preserving approach may appeal to users who want to avoid broadcasting every position and strategy.
That does not guarantee adoption, but it does make Ascend one of the more ambitious designs in the current lineup. It is not trying to be just another copy of an existing derivatives interface. It is attempting to merge privacy, leverage, and event-driven markets into a different kind of trading experience.
Minute Markets simplifies trading, but raises the tempo
Minute Markets takes a more stripped-down path. Its core idea is simple: short-duration prediction markets where users choose whether a price moves up or down over a very small time window. Peter describes this as one of the easiest products in the group to understand, and that simplicity may be a real advantage for onboarding.
The tradeoff is that simple does not mean safe. Fast cycles can encourage impulsive behavior, especially when the interface feels more like a casual app than a high-risk financial tool. Peter explicitly flags the danger of overtrading here, even while praising the clarity of the design.
Minute Markets may also benefit from automation features and smart-wallet-style strategies, which could make repeat participation easier. If the product remains understandable while adding useful controls, it could find a niche among users who want an accessible entry point into prediction markets on Cardano.
User experience may decide the winners
Across all four platforms, Peter keeps returning to one practical issue: user experience. The interfaces may feel intuitive to experienced DeFi users, but not necessarily to newcomers. For this category to expand beyond a small circle of active traders, the products will need clearer onboarding, better risk explanation, and smoother wallet integration.
He argues that mobile distribution could be especially important. If perpetual and prediction products are eventually integrated cleanly into popular Cardano wallets, they become far more accessible to ordinary users. That kind of convenience can increase adoption, but it also makes responsible product design even more important.
Perp season may be here for Cardano, but the long-term winners will be the platforms that manage risk well, explain their products clearly, and earn user trust.
That is ultimately the core takeaway from the episode. More products alone do not equal meaningful adoption. What matters is whether these platforms can combine liquidity, clarity, and trust into something sustainable.
Key Takeaways
- Cardano now has multiple projects competing in the perpetuals and prediction market space, with Strike Finance, Atlas, Ascend, and Minute Markets each taking a different approach.
- Perpetuals let traders go long or short with leverage, but they also introduce liquidation risk and should be treated as an active trading tool rather than passive income.
- Strike Finance is currently the most established platform in the group, with a live mainnet product and a broader cross-chain expansion strategy.
- Atlas is trying to solve Cardano’s fragmented stablecoin liquidity problem through a unified collateral and liquidity model.
- Ascend combines prediction markets with perpetuals and adds privacy through zero-knowledge infrastructure on Midnight.
- Minute Markets focuses on short-duration prediction markets, making the user experience simple and fast but potentially encouraging overtrading.
- Peter argues that better mobile wallet integration and cleaner user experience could be key to bringing more retail users into Cardano DeFi products.
- The long-term winners in this sector are likely to be the platforms that combine liquidity, risk management, clear product design, and user trust.
Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only. Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice. Always do your own research.
Text Transcript
So Cardano DeFi is about to get a little chaotic and for years critics of Cardano have said it’s too slow for high-speed trading but right now we have a multi-factor war essentially or perpetual swaps on Cardano and things are starting to break out here. We aren’t just looking at one leveraged platform we’re looking at four platforms at the moment. We have Strike Finance which is already live on mainnet and leading the charge going cross-chain. We also have Atlas, Ascend and Minit Markets all in the mix here looking to try and gain more attention in this perpetual space and today we’re going to break down all these platforms see where we are at in this perpetual space and see if it will really transform Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem or will it leave a lot of traders liquidated. All right let’s get into it. Hey everyone my name’s Peter if it’s your first time here hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe on your way in. I talk all things crypto and this is definitely no exception. Perpetuals are a big thing at the moment and with all these platforms loading up and launching on Cardano it’s no surprise that they’ll gain a lot of attention. We’ve got Strike, Ascend, Atlas and Minit Markets all in the mix there but before I go into each one of these platforms I should probably get you all up to speed with what perpetuals are. I know a lot of you are scratching your heads there thinking what on earth are you talking about Peter? I’ve never heard of this before and we do need to try and get a level playing field for everyone so that you know what it’s all about and I know a lot of you out there are beginners and this is more of an advanced trading technique that a lot of people use to try and amplify their gains. So perpetuals are a way to let traders bet on whether an asset will go up or down without owning it directly. If you think the price will rise you put a long position in, if you think it’s going to fall you can short that position and traders can use leverage which means they can take a bigger position than the money that they actually put into that long or short position. This can increase their profits but also increase their losses. The money used to keep the trade open is called a margin and if the market moves too fast in either direction the trader there may not have enough margin left and the position gets liquidated which means they lose all their assets and the money that they borrowed everything is called upon. That means the platform automatically closes that trade. The perps also use funding rates to help keep the perps price close to the real market price. Depending on market conditions longs may pay shorts or shorts may pay longs. This is why perps create a lot of activity on the chain. Traders can go long, they can go short, they can adjust their positions, they can hedge against what they’ve done, they can trade small price movements more often than they would by compared to simply buying and holding onto an asset or buying and selling an asset. And for Cardano this really matters because perps can create more DeFi volume, more fees, more transactions, more demand, the stable coins used as trading collateral. So a lot of benefits here for the Cardano ecosystem if perpetuals really take the center stage. But like I said they are highly risky. The leverage can wipe out your positions very quickly so perps should be treated as an active trading tool and not a passive source of income. So keep that in mind everyone. So now that we have the grounding work here in play let’s have a look at some of these platforms. Now Strike Finance launched I think it was in 2024 here. So they’ve been around for a while and they’ve been building in this space and have really dominated. They’re onto version 2 now and we’re going to see more and more of what Strike has to offer over the next year as they start going cross-chain. So they’ve gone into v2 now which is compatible with Ethereum EVM chain but they’re also working on the Solana side of things and I’ve heard from whispers from other Solana creators that they’re starting to pick up on Strike Finance here and what they’re doing. So keep an eye on this one. This is definitely going to gain a lot of attention. I have done interviews with the founder Shand before as well so if you want to check that out, links down below for you so you get a better understanding. Also have an online course as well. I’ll put links to that down below. It’s all free. You can gain access to it at learncadano.io. But this is the platform here essentially. You can see the price movements, where it’s going and then from here you can actually then connect your wallet, put in how much you want to trade and open a long or short position. Basically the prediction of which direction the market will go from this point in time and based off that you can then start managing your trade. You can adjust the collateral that’s behind it or put in stop losses and all sorts of really really cool features that they’ve put into the platform to make your trading experience a lot easier. Do look at the documentation so you get a better understanding of how this all works but Strike Finance is definitely leading the charge. They have a lot of other things such as different various vaults and also really easy staking within their platform as well. So other things that you can look into if you happen to have their token or anything else within their ecosystem. So do look at all that links to the documentation, the website, everything down below. Now the next one that I’ll point out here is Atlas and I found this one quite interesting because they’re looking at some of the issues that happen within the Cadano ecosystem and changing their architecture to try and address all these things. So they have a testnet that’s coming up on the 19th of May so the time recording this is the 18th so if you’re watching this a little bit early do check out their testnet. It’s all on the preview or pre-prod networks so you don’t need to worry about using real funds. You can just play around with the platform so you get an understanding of how it works and that’s probably a really good way of getting into all this. But they’ll have markets such as ADA, BTC, ETH, XRP, SNEC, Mincoins and all that. But the interesting thing, like I said, they’re taking a different approach here and it’s mainly because one of the biggest bottlenecks within the ecosystem is the lack of stablecoins. So Cadano does have stablecoins but not enough liquidity, not enough of them in the ecosystem to make trading really efficient and really easy. So because of that limited liquidity in stablecoins they’ve gone for a different approach and this is all around a unified liquidity model where the liquidity from all these stablecoins, because you’ve got USDCX, USDM, USDA, JED or IUSD, I don’t know if they’ll put those ones in, but because we have that fragmented liquidity of different stablecoins and different amounts and volumes, the liquidity is very thin. So they’re combining all of this liquidity into a single vault and using that as the base collateral for all their assets. So it eliminates that issue of thin liquidity for stablecoins and I really kind of like that. I don’t know how this works mechanics wise in the backend or smart contracts or whatever, but that idea and concept I think works really well. I don’t know, I’ve always seen this as a major issue. If you look at the other DEXs, we have various trading pairs such as ADA and USDC. We have Mintoken and USDC. Now because we have USDC split into two different pools there, we have a lot less USDC capital efficiency in terms of those particular trades. So when you do a trade for ADA and USDC, you may get slippage because all the USDC is split across multiple different pools. If you could just have one giant pool of assets such as one giant pool of USDC that’s used across all of Minswap, then the Mintoken or ADA token or whatever token that you’re trading with could use that deeper liquidity pool because it’s all grouped into one big pool. Now this takes it further. Instead of just USDC as one pool, it’s unifying all those stablecoin assets into one pool. So instead of having a hundred of USDCX here, a hundred of USDM here, you pull it all together and you have 200 of USD stable assets. Totally makes sense. So I love that idea and concept, eliminating that fragmented liquidity. All right, so we’re looking, I’m looking forward to this one here. So this is definitely something to keep an eye out. Now I think Atlas could be important because Catano does not need leverage. It needs liquidity. If Atlas can make stablecoin collateral more useful, that could pull more stablecoins into the ecosystem. So fingers crossed on that. Keep an eye on this one. You’re going to see what happens here. The next one here is Ascend. And this one’s different in many different ways. Firstly, it’s built with zero knowledge proof on midnight. So this is one of the dApps that’s launching on midnight. And I’ve been told from many people that they’ve passed the test nets. They’re all ready to launch on mainnet. They’ve been given that tick of approval to launch. And this one’s very exciting. So you get to preserve your privacy when you’re on the platform and doing trades or whatever, you get to protect yourself in regards to who’s actually doing those trades. So a lot of the other platforms don’t have that. If you look at PolyMarkets, which is very similar to this one here, you can see the wallets and you can see the activity and you can see what’s happening behind each one of the trades. This here will allow you protect yourself and your privacy and the wallet activity of who’s doing what on the particular platform. Really cool, exciting stuff. The other thing, this isn’t just a perpetual platform, it is a prediction market. So other ones that you may be familiar with in the Catano ecosystem is Bodega Markets. And they’re a really cool prediction platform that has been around for a while. But these guys are adding in perpetuals and the prediction side of things. You can check out their website itself. You can get to it at ascend.markets. But like I said, all the links, everything I talk about in the video description down below. Have a look at the platform yourself. It will give you various different options of what prediction markets you can pick and choose. And essentially, you connect your wallet and you look at the market here and you can go, OK, will price of ADA go up or down or will it go up by a predicted date? And from there, you can start trading on that one and you can say, yes, it will or no, it won’t on that particular market. So that’s the idea of this one here. But they’ve added in also the level of perpetuals in there so you can leverage your prediction answer as well. So lots of really cool mechanics that the team have put in there. I think one of the most important things is that midnight and privacy side of things. So this is a lot of things in play here that the Ascend Market team have put together. So this is the platform here. You can see the price bet here, current price, how long it will go for. And then if you want to go long or short on this particular market here. So we don’t have much time. There are smaller windows for this one here that we are seeing at the moment. So Ascend is probably the most weirdest one here, but probably the most interesting one because it is not just trading assets. It is trading those possibilities. So really cool stuff. Now, the last market I’ll talk about is Minute Market. And this one here is different. Again, they’re also different. It’s because they’ve gone for shorter time periods for their predictions. So you can do 5, 10, and here 20 minute prediction markets on Condano. And you’re basically looking at the market and then saying, will it go up? Will it go down? So this is the website here. And we’ve got this market, which is the price of oil and USD. And we’re choosing whether the price of oil will go up or down in the next 10 minutes or 9 minutes and 40 seconds. So if you think it’s going to go up, great. You put in an up option, connect your wallet, fund that particular bet, and then you’ll see if your prediction is right or not. And if you’re right, you earn some assets. If you’re not, you lose those assets. So this is definitely a really quick and easy way of getting into a market. Just simply choosing up or down based on 10 minute windows or however long the market or however big the market is. So nice and easy one there. I do like minute markets because of that simplicity of how it works. One of the other things that they have is automation of those particular trades. So you can create a strategy behind this. I haven’t played around with it too much, but you can create a strategy behind it and make your trades automated with their smart wallets. I believe with a smart wallet, you can open it up, fund it with a large amount of assets. And then from that, it will trade based on your strategy up, down, up, down, based on whatever parameters you put into the platform itself. So really cool, really interesting one there. And I think it makes the prediction market side of things quite exciting because of that fast paced time windows. So really cool there. A lot of gamification, a lot of over-trading could happen as well. And the UI UX is very simple on that one. So I do like minute markets. Now it’s definitely the most easiest to understand out of all the platforms, but it might also be the most dangerous. Fast rounds feel really simple, but fast and simple doesn’t mean low risk. So please make sure you know what you’re doing when you’re playing around with any of these platforms. Now, overall, all of these platforms, what it means for Gdano, it definitely means more trading volume, more fee generation for the ecosystem, for the treasury. Overall, there’ll be definitely more stablecoin demand because of the platform’s use of those particular stablecoins. And it gives users more of a reason to stay on chain as well. So the potential for these vaults and liquid staking and revenue sharing, there’s so many different ideas that all of these platforms are playing with and I like where things are going. Now, one of the big things I’d love to see improved is the user experience of all of this. The websites are fantastic. And if you’re technically minded, if you’re used to a lot of these interfaces, you will be pretty much feeling quite comfortable and at home. But if you’ve never seen any of this before, you probably be scared of not knowing what to do. And I think a really important way or really good way to improve the user experience is to integrate it into mobile apps and have it on the mobile wallets that you may be using, such as Vespa, Eternal, Lace, when it eventually comes out. But you’ll be able to use these platforms here, such as MinuteMarket within your mobile wallet and be able to just open it up and flick to the app here, Minute, and then go, oh yeah, price of oil is going to go up in the next five minutes. It’s got to go down the next 10 minutes, whatever it is. I think that type of user experience is really quick and easy. I’ve seen people at the gym in between their sets, open up betting apps like this, not like this, but you know, other betting apps and place a bet in between their sets. It’s insane. I know Australians do have an issue with gambling, so please, if you do seek some help, but having that type of user experience, I think is the best way to onboard and get retail in front of these platforms. Get it on the mobile, get it in the mobile wallets, get into the wallet app ecosystem, and you have a definite winner there. Anyway, Perp season is definitely in here for the Cardano ecosystem. Will it bring real liquidity, real users? I sure hope so. It will definitely bring sustainable fees and treasury fulfillment if these Perps platforms really do bring in the users. So I’m really hoping it does, but we shouldn’t confuse leverage for adoption. The winners will be the platforms that manage risk well, explain their product clearly, and build enough trust with their users to keep them coming back. Now, if you got anything out of this, please hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell on your way out. If you want to be a channel member, you can do so. Channel memberships are down below as well. Gets you early access to all these videos and all these special videos I’ll be doing in the future as well. So do check that out too. And if you can’t do any of that, just hit that thumbs up button on the way out. Stay positive guys. I’ll see you in the next video.
Comments