Perp vaults on Hyperliquid, Lighter, Paradex, GMX and more — screened every day against published criteria

A perp DEX vault (also written perps vault) is a pool of capital on a decentralized perpetual futures exchange — a perp DEX, also written perp-DEX or perpdex, trading perpetuals. You deposit USDC or another asset, receive shares, and the pool either takes the other side of traders or is run by an operator who trades the capital. The best-known examples are protocol pools such as Hyperliquid's HLP (Hyperliquidity Provider), Lighter's LLP, the dYdX MegaVault, GMX GM pools and GLV vaults, Gains Network gUSDC, Ostium's OLP and Aster's ALP, and operator-run user vaults on Hyperliquid, Lighter and Paradex. Returns come from trading fees, funding payments and the losses of leveraged traders; they fall when traders win, when a strategy stops working, or when a liquidation cascade overwhelms the pool.

Most vault pages show an APY that is extrapolated from a few recent days, or an account value that grows when people deposit. Neither tells you what a share of the vault actually earned. PerpVault measures the flow-adjusted return: deposits and withdrawals are removed before performance is calculated and the value of a single share is tracked instead, so a vault that attracted capital does not look like a vault that earned it. That is why our figures often differ from the platform's headline APY, and why a vault with strong inflows can look worse here than it does on its own page.

Every vault on the nine perp DEXs we cover — Hyperliquid, Lighter, Paradex, dYdX, GMX, Gains, Ostium, Aster and Veranta — and the strategy vaults on HyperEVM is measured the same way, six times a day, and screened against published criteria: at least 90 days of verifiable history, a maximum drawdown under 30%, at least $250k deposited, an annualised return of at least 5%, a quality score, open to outside depositors and still active. The thresholds are public, applied automatically and never overridden by hand; no vault can pay to be listed. Each day's screen is stored as a hashed snapshot that you can verify yourself, and every entry, exit and score move is written to an append-only change log.

A headline return hides the path. For every vault we show the maximum drawdown over all observed points, the worst month, the share of positive months, and how much of the total return came from a single month. We also keep our own record of liquidations, open interest and funding across Binance, Bybit and OKX, mark the days when liquidation volume reached the top of its range for the past year, and report how each vault behaved on those market stress days. A vault that earned 40% a year but lost 15% in one liquidation cascade is a different product from one that earned 15% without a losing month.

Protocol pools such as HLP, LLP, the MegaVault, GM pools and ALP — liquidity provider (LP) vaults — are the counterparty to all traders on their exchange: steady small gains in calm markets, rare large losses when traders win in a crash, and in some cases price exposure to the assets in the pool. Operator vaults are strategies run by an individual or a team who take a performance fee; their results depend on the operator's skill, leverage and the share of their own capital in the vault. PerpVault shows both side by side, with the structure, lock-up, fee and operator stake of each vault where the platform publishes them.

The daily screen lists the vaults that met every threshold today. All vaults shows everything we observe with your own filters, including rising vaults and just-launched vaults. Each vault page compares the vault with holding bitcoin and with stablecoin lending over exactly the same window, and Compare puts two vaults on one chart. In the tables, "Return / yr" is annualised over the whole history, "Last 30d" is the plain return of the last thirty days, "vs BTC" is the vault's annualised return minus bitcoin's over the same window in percentage points, and pools that hold BTC, ETH or SOL are marked because their USD return includes those price moves. PerpVault is a data product, not investment advice: appearing on the screen means a vault met objective thresholds on a given day, nothing more.

No. PerpVault is a data product. Appearing on the screen means a vault met objective thresholds on a given day; it is not a recommendation, and not appearing is not a judgement. Vault operators cannot pay to be listed, and sponsorship has no influence on the screen. Any position we hold in a listed vault is disclosed on the methodology page.