Dialogue with Aster CEO: Leveraging L1 to drive institutional adoption, Aster Ninja strikes in 2026

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

As long as you take action, there will be substantial output.

This is the explanation given by Aster CEO Leonard Leung regarding the "ninja spirit" when the community expressed curiosity about the frequently appearing "🥷- Ninja" image in social media materials, emphasizing that true strength does not need noisy proof.

To some extent, this statement can also serve as a true reflection of Aster's past year.

Under the near-monopoly pressure of Hyperliquid, in September 2025, Aster made a stunning debut in the TGE as a dark horse, becoming a newcomer in the Perp DEX track that cannot be ignored.

Coinciding with Aster's first anniversary and the arrival of two major milestones for Aster Chain, we had an in-depth conversation with Leonard.

Regarding the "ninja spirit," Leonard views it as an ultimate execution power:

"The ninja spirit" is one of Aster's team principles. We pursue continuous delivery rather than over-commitment, establishing trust through results.

This restraint and determination ran throughout the entire conversation. When discussing Aster's achievements over the past year, Leonard directly provided his judgment:

Aster entered the right track at the right time; Perp DEX is a market with clear vertical value.

When asked about effective growth strategies after the TGE, Leonard remained clear-headed:

Airdrops are a double-edged sword. The only important metric for effectively utilizing airdrops is how much of the incentivized traffic ultimately converts into real users and forms sustainable revenue and retention. Aster's goal is very clear: we hope users come for the airdrop and stay for the product.

When discussing the launch of Aster Chain, Leonard emphasized that this move was not due to the pressure of "having to upgrade," but rather a proactive strategic choice:

From the very beginning, Aster has regarded privacy as a core value. Through Aster Chain, Aster can natively embed privacy capabilities at the infrastructure level while ensuring stability and high responsiveness, which will strongly promote institutions' substantial adoption of decentralized trading.

In this issue, let us follow Leonard Leung's narrative to understand Aster's main achievements over the past year, and through the details of Aster Chain's layout, step into the larger future that Aster is betting on in the new competitive landscape of DEX in 2026.

Aster's First Anniversary: Choosing the Right Track and Achieving Success

Deep Tide TechFlow: Thank you for your time. Aster has experienced very rapid growth this year. Before we officially dive into the topic, could you please introduce your main responsibilities at Aster from your role?

Leonard Leung:

Hello everyone, I am Leonard Leung, the CEO of Aster. On the occasion of Aster's first anniversary, I am glad to have the opportunity to share the journey of Aster and our thoughts on future development.

Deep Tide TechFlow: The past year has been a remarkable year for Aster in the DEX track. At this anniversary celebration, which is the best time to "show the report card," what was the challenge that you found to be the "most difficult" yet "most rewarding" in the past year?

Leonard Leung:

When we initially pushed for brand rebranding, the market was almost monopolized by Hyperliquid, and at that time, very few believed that there would be newcomers capable of shaking this pattern. Especially before Aster's TGE, for a long time, the market generally thought this was nearly impossible.

Before Aster's TGE, as far as I know, external expectations for Aster's FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) were not high. However, in the end, we achieved a valuation far exceeding market expectations, which greatly pushed the market to re-examine the space and value of the Perp DEX track.

In fact, we once delayed the Aster TGE plan because we believed there was still room for further optimization before the product officially launched. But later, we decided to prioritize "execution speed" over merely "pursuing perfection." Looking back now, this was the right decision.

Deep Tide TechFlow: During the process of facing challenges, which moment made you feel that Aster had truly built its core competitiveness?

Leonard Leung:

I think this moment occurred in the second half of 2025.

Entering the second half of 2025, Aster's platform 24-hour trading volume continued to rise, growing from over ++$1 billion++ in June to ++$11 billion++ in September. This growth rate made us truly feel that the project was entering an accelerated development phase.

Of course, what left a deeper impression on more people was the performance during Aster's TGE in September, when the platform achieved key milestones such as a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $345 million, 330,000 new wallet addresses, and a platform TVL exceeding $1 billion, further solidifying Aster's position in the DEX market.

As the project continued to break trading volume records, we increasingly realized that Aster entered the right track at the right time; Perp DEX is a market with clear vertical value.

And when we launched the truly "optional privacy" feature of the L1 mainnet, this judgment became even more firm: we believe Aster Chain is a unique product form that has not yet appeared in the current market and is also an important prerequisite for promoting large-scale application of on-chain trading.

Under the Privacy Barrier: Aster's Continuous Delivery "Ninja Spirit"

Deep Tide TechFlow: Behind achievements are the team's decisions and execution. In Aster's social media, we can easily grasp the distinct style symbol of "🥷- Ninja," so we would like to ask you to share what kind of team temperament and working style Aster hopes to convey through "🥷- Ninja"? Does this "🥷- Ninja spirit" also influence your decision-making style and team management approach?

Leonard Leung:

We chose "Ninja" as the style symbol for Aster's social media not for the sense of mystery, but for the ultimate action power.

Ninjas often possess great strength but are not noisy; instead, they continue to make an impact in a restrained and subtle manner. For Aster, this spirit corresponds to saying less and doing more, prioritizing execution, and establishing trust through results.

Specifically, I usually break down this core spirit into three levels regarding Aster's team style:

Low-key and efficient in parallel. We do not pursue frequent exposure under the spotlight but focus on quietly accumulating and executing the most precise strikes. Internally, this means high-frequency and precise cooperation within the team, while externally we always maintain restraint, just like ninjas never loudly announce before taking action, but strive for precision in every strike.

Continuous delivery rather than over-commitment. Rather than extravagant promotions, we prefer "delivering results directly." We do not make promises lightly, but as long as we take action, there will definitely be substantial output, because before making a commitment, I ensure that the team has the capability to deliver, rather than trading vision for short-term attention.

Execution first, let results speak. In Aster's values, execution outweighs volume; we hope all the team's energy is focused on realizing the blueprint rather than polishing words or crafting personas.

It can be said that, to a large extent, the "ninja spirit" is not just a brand symbol but a true guideline for Aster's team.

Deep Tide TechFlow: There are already too many DEX in crypto, but Aster has still achieved success. From your perspective, what do you think is the most irreplaceable value that Aster truly brings to users?

Leonard Leung:

If I were to summarize Aster's most irreplaceable value, I believe the core is two points: privacy and trading experience.

Aster has regarded privacy as a core value since its inception and is willing to make necessary trade-offs for it. At the same time, this insistence on privacy constitutes our real moat, giving Aster the confidence for long-term survival in the fiercely competitive DEX track.

The launch of Aster Chain is precisely to address the long-standing trading pain points in the traditional DeFi market. Previously, incidents of position sniping on Hyperliquid occurred frequently, exposing the structural risks brought by excessive transparency in on-chain trading. Aster's answer is to find a truly feasible balance between on-chain fund transparency and trading privacy. This not only provides DEX users with a safer choice but, more importantly, offers CEX whales the realistic conditions to migrate large positions on-chain.

Deep Tide TechFlow: What do you think is the truly difficult-to-replicate technical barrier in the current DEX competition?

Leonard Leung:

The competition among DEX is essentially a long-term liquidity battle. Technical solutions have now become the basic threshold for entry; users should not feel any difference between centralized and decentralized architectures when trading. This is Aster's core pursuit in terms of technology.

The Essence of Growth: Coming for Airdrops, Staying for the Product

Deep Tide TechFlow: "Growth" is also an unavoidable topic. In the past year, when did Aster's growth peak? What factors drove it? And do you think the growth strategy at that time is still effective now? Facing the topic of "growth," what other trump cards does Aster have for the future?

Leonard Leung:

The growth peak occurred during the TGE period in September 2025.

This peak was driven not by a single factor but by the result of multiple variables interlocking and interacting: precise product positioning, well-thought-out tokenomics design, clear and credible development roadmap, along with broad support and dissemination from community users and industry opinion leaders, all contributed to this explosive growth phase.

The real turning point for growth occurred when the liquidity and product experience of Perp DEX reached a level sufficient to compete with CEX. The market has been looking for a more transparent alternative to CEX, which is fundamentally why Perp DEX took off.

Moreover, in the DeFi field, trust is crucial and hard to come by. The endorsement from BNB Chain and CZ helped us complete a key cold start (Bootstrap), while the series of factual measures that the team has long been cultivating and continuously building also laid a solid foundation for trust. With trust as the cornerstone, user acquisition and conversion truly became possible.

Of course, for this cycle of Perp DEX, airdrop incentives have become standard. However, airdrops are a double-edged sword:

They can bring explosive user growth but can also attract a group of speculators who have no real demand for the product itself.

But without airdrops, at least in the initial stage, you might not even get the ticket to compete.

Therefore, I believe that how to effectively utilize airdrops hinges on balancing the ratio of real users to "farmers" and correctly managing market expectations. All projects that choose to conduct airdrops must plan ahead and have the capacity to absorb the impact after the TGE, because as farmers transition, various data and revenue usually experience a sharp decline.

I have always believed that the only truly important metric is not the impressive surface numbers during the airdrop incentive period, but how much of the incentivized traffic can ultimately convert into real users and form sustainable revenue and retention.

Thus, our growth goal has always been very clear: coming for airdrops, staying for the product.

Aster Chain Will Strongly Promote Substantial Adoption by Institutions

Deep Tide TechFlow: On the occasion of the first anniversary, another important milestone for Aster is the arrival of Aster Chain. In your view, since L1 has become redundant, why does Aster still need to create its own L1?

Leonard Leung:

The core motivation for choosing to create Aster Chain is to build an environment specifically designed for perpetual contract trading.

We know that institutional-level trading has higher confidentiality requirements. For large traders, strategy exposure, front-running, and position sniping can directly affect their real trading intentions. By building its own L1, Aster can natively embed privacy capabilities at the infrastructure level, thereby better protecting trading behaviors and ensuring that the strategies for large trades are not maliciously manipulated.

Additionally, we hope to provide an experience comparable to centralized exchanges, where both responsiveness and stability are indispensable. However, most general-purpose L2s or public chains currently struggle to balance both. Aster Chain's block time is set at 50ms and supports over 100,000 TPS, which is crucial for high-frequency trading and high-leverage derivatives scenarios.

More importantly, having its own L1 means we can deeply customize everything from the "consensus mechanism" to the "execution layer." This complete control over the underlying tech stack can further ensure that we focus our attention on trading optimization, continuously building a high-performance derivatives platform.

L1 can also become the underlying support for overall liquidity, which not only helps increase asset diversity but also reduces reliance on a single stablecoin, thereby building a more robust and scalable decentralized financial ecosystem.

From this perspective, only by building its own L1 can Aster truly break through the limitations of existing general-purpose public chains and fundamentally solve key issues that traders care about most, such as speed, privacy, and cost.

Deep Tide TechFlow: The official launch of Aster Chain will bring what qualitative leaps to the Aster ecosystem and the entire DEX track?

Leonard Leung:

I believe that Aster Chain will strongly promote substantial adoption of decentralized trading by institutions.

The lack of privacy protection has always been a core barrier preventing institutional funds from entering on-chain trading on a large scale. Now, with Aster providing a truly usable privacy trading solution, institutions will at least begin to try to move some trades on-chain. The reasons for this are compelling:

On one hand, institutions want to achieve diversification in asset allocation; on the other hand, more and more institutions actually believe that the future of trading will ultimately belong to DEX, and they have just been waiting for a sufficiently mature solution.

And now, Aster Chain is that solution.

Finally, another noteworthy point is that through the synergy of Aster Chain and Aster Code, developers and financial institutions can quickly deploy customized on-chain derivatives trading solutions, which means Aster is not just a trading platform but an open infrastructure that can fully empower partners to build efficient, private, and competitive trading interfaces on the Aster chain, collectively expanding the boundaries of the entire ecosystem.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Launching Aster Chain at this time, does it mean that Aster has reached a stage where it must upgrade its underlying capabilities?

Leonard Leung:

Product upgrades have always been our continuous effort direction, but the timing of launching Aster Chain does not come from some "pressure to upgrade," but rather a proactive strategic choice.

In simple terms, we saw the real pain points in the market, judged the direction, set the development schedule, and then executed.

When you clearly know what users need and what the existing infrastructure cannot provide, and then build according to the plan, it is a very natural choice.

Deep Tide TechFlow: For ordinary users, what are the most intuitive changes in their daily trading experience with the arrival of Aster Chain? During the important window period of Aster Chain's official launch, what participation opportunities and early benefits do ordinary users have?

Leonard Leung:

For ordinary users, the most intuitive change is reflected in the product interface. Now, users can start using a series of new features such as Account Privacy switch, blockchain explorer, Viewer Pass, etc., to immediately experience the flexibility and security brought by "optional" privacy trading, and all of this will not come at the expense of any trading speed, while also enjoying the convenience of zero Gas fees.

In addition, thanks to our strategic partnership with WLFI, the platform will expand support for USD1 contract trading pairs, giving users more diverse asset choices and further enriching trading scenarios.

Regarding early participation benefits, we are launching the Staking Program first, aimed at providing exclusive incentives for early participants. Users can choose different validation nodes and staking durations, and by staking $ASTER, they can receive rewards. Users interested in detailed rules and participation methods can visit the official ++Gitbook++ for more information.

Deep Tide TechFlow: Last question, if we fast forward to March 2027, Aster's second anniversary: what key achievements do you hope Aster will have achieved? And after another year of hard work, what kind of presence do you hope Aster will have in the minds of users?

Leonard Leung:

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, what I most look forward to seeing is the privacy features truly driving substantial adoption of decentralized trading by institutions, and I believe my expectations can be well realized.

In the minds of users, I hope Aster becomes not just a useful trading platform, but an infrastructure that can be trusted long-term and capable of carrying real funds and trading strategies.