The process of building a perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) has changed massively over the last few years. Traditionally, a team had to solve several difficult problems in parallel. Beyond developing the product itself, builders needed to develop and support the tech stack behind the order book, secure and maintain deep liquidity, and build strong relationships with market makers — all of which required significant resources.
by Ran Yi, Co-Founder of Orderly, Yevhenii Andrushchak, Software Architect at Sigma Software Group
Today, builders can rely on existing infrastructure and shared liquidity instead of building the entire trading stack themselves.
That shifts the focus. The question is no longer only whether a team has the resources to build an exchange. It is increasingly whether it has the audience, distribution, or market opportunity to build a successful one. As a result, a much wider range of teams can now consider launching a DEX, from Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) with established trading communities to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications looking to add a revenue stream, memecoin projects, and other Web3 teams with an existing audience or a reason to bring trading into their product.
Launch Can Become Validation
Lower barriers make it possible to test demand before making a major investment in the product. With solutions such as Orderly One, an initial DEX can be set up in around 30 minutes, with the cost of starting to monetize it as low as $10. Teams can then see how the market responds before investing further.
Do users actually trade? Do they come back? Does the community respond to the proposition? Which markets gain traction?
The first version can therefore be treated as a means of validating the opportunity rather than as a finished product.
Distribution Is an Advantage
Those gaining the most traction tend to be builders who have cracked distribution: they can mobilize existing communities or user bases, build on strong relationships with traders, or develop creative marketing and growth campaigns.
Among DEXs built on Orderly, Aden, for example, reached $45 billion in volume in three months, while MemeMax generated $1.5 million in revenue over the same period. Both illustrate an important advantage in the current market: builders do not necessarily have to create demand from scratch if they can bring an existing community or user base into a new trading product.
Don’t Build for the Entire Market
Having an audience is only part of the equation. The next question is what kind of trading product to build for it. The opportunity is increasingly in serving specific communities, assets, or markets that other venues do not cover. Differentiation can also come from custom integrations, such as advanced trading tools.
The point is not necessarily to offer every market or compete with every existing exchange. It is to understand which community or market you are particularly well positioned to serve.
Economics Can Shape Growth
Trading fees are the most obvious revenue lever and can be customized for maker and taker volumes as well as for crypto and real-world assets (RWAs). But they are not the only option. Depending on the infrastructure they use, builders can also experiment with points programs, trading competitions, multi-level referrals, and creating their own perpetual markets.
Looking for a technology partner for your trading platform?
The economics vary across infrastructure platforms: some allow builders to set their own fees, while others offer revenue-sharing models tied to trading activity or markets created by the builder.
The important question is not simply which model generates the highest share of revenue, but which one supports the behavior the DEX needs to grow. Referral programs help bring in new traders, incentives stimulate activity, and creating new markets opens trading around underserved assets. In some cases, builders can also earn by referring other teams into the ecosystem, or by taking a share of the revenue a new market generates across the wider ecosystem, not just on their own exchange.
What’s Next?
As usage grows, teams may want to evolve the product further by adapting the user experience, developing custom functionality and integrations, adding analytics and automation, strengthening security, and preparing the platform for greater scale.
This is where the choice of a technology partner can matter. Evolving a trading product requires more than blockchain expertise: it also calls for product and business understanding, alongside capabilities in engineering, security, data, and other areas that increasingly intersect as the platform grows. A technology partner such as Sigma Software Group can bring these capabilities together and help teams make informed technology and product decisions as they move from an initial launch to a more mature trading platform.
In other words, the infrastructure may give builders a faster path to market. What they build on top of it is what can ultimately make the DEX their own.
About Orderly
Orderly provides omnichain trading infrastructure and shared liquidity, enabling teams to build and launch decentralized exchanges and trading products without developing the underlying trading infrastructure from scratch.
About Sigma Software Group
Sigma Software Group is a global technology ecosystem bringing together software engineering, product development, innovation, and investment expertise. With 24 years of experience and 2,000+ specialists, the Group works across FinTech, blockchain, AI, cybersecurity, and other technology domains, helping companies build and scale complex digital products.
