Perps Hit snooze: CEX Futures Volume Naps at $4T, Lowest Since December 2023 😴

Crypto perpetual futures trading volume on centralized exchanges fell to $4 trillion in July, a 31-month low not seen since December 2023, according to analytics platform CryptoRank. Binance led centralized venues with $1.4 trillion in monthly perpetual futures volume, followed by OKX with $607 billion and Bybit with $300 billion. Perpetual futures volumes briefly recovered between April and June before declining across all major venues in July, CryptoRank said in a Friday X post.

The pullback extended to spot markets as daily spot crypto trading volume dropped 23.6% between July 1 and July 31, falling from $17.8 billion to $13.6 billion, according to analytics provider Coinglass. The decline marked a broader cooldown in crypto market activity across both centralized and decentralized venues.

Perpetual trading volume on decentralized exchanges fell to $531 billion in July, the lowest level since June 2025 and a 21% decline from the $676 billion recorded in June 2026, according to data aggregator DefiLlama. DEX perps trading volume has trended lower since the $1.36 trillion peak seen in October 2025. Open interest on DEXs also slipped to $17.9 billion in July from a peak of $19.4 billion in September 2025, with open interest measuring the total value of active, unsettled contracts and serving as an indicator of whether new capital is entering or exiting the market.

Hyperliquid remained the leading DEX with $199 billion in reported trading volume over the past 30 days. A growing share of that activity has come from tokenized real-world assets, which accounted for 32% of Hyperliquid's second-quarter trading activity and generated 6.6% of the protocol's $169 million quarterly revenue. Tokenized assets became Hyperliquid's largest trading category for the first time last month, with RWAs representing 52% of its total weekly trading volume between July 13 and July 19.