In the past seven days, decentralized exchange Aster has generated $69.5 million in fees, according to DeFiLlama. That puts the DEX’s fee capture higher than Circle’s $53.9 million for the week and Uniswap’s $32 million.

Aster’s performance can be attributed to a surge in perpetual trading volume, large whale trades, active order books, and a private order book design on the chains where it operates.

The platform’s fee-to-TVL ratio was about 0.55%, roughly 14 times higher than competitors like Hyperliquid, although some data suggests some of this activity might not be driven by organic volume.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

Onchain analyst @dethective on X suggested that $2.5 billion of Aster’s $42 billion in volume came from wash trading.

“The total wash trading volume is roughly 6% of the exchange’s total volume, peaking in the BTC market, the most traded pair,” noted @dethective.

“Honestly, the situation is not as bad as I expected. Percentages are lower than I thought and most of this may actually come from airdrop farmers.”