Aster Deepens WLFI Partnership With USD1 Perpetual Markets

Aster, the decentralized perpetuals exchange backed by YZi Labs, is expanding its collaboration with World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project affiliated with the Trump family, adding USD1-denominated perpetual contracts and an incentive program aimed at bootstrapping stablecoin liquidity ahead of the platform’s Layer 1 launch.

The exchange is starting with BTC, ETH, and SOL pairs, with more than 10 additional pairs planned in the coming weeks. USD1 is also supported as a core margin asset and collateral equivalent to USDT, and Aster is offering zero maker fees and a 0.5-bps taker fee on USD1 pairs, an approximately 87.5% reduction compared to its standard 4-bps USDT taker fee.

Up to 2.5 million WLFI tokens will be distributed monthly through the USD1 perpetual trading incentive program based on trading activity, with rewards distributed weekly.

Donald Trump Jr., co-founder of World Liberty Financial, promoted the launch on X, saying, “This is how you scale stablecoin utility beyond just payments.”

“Aster Chain’s success depends on the depth of its underlying liquidity,” said Leonard, CEO of Aster. “By bringing USD1 into our core trading engine during this phase, we’re building the trading foundation for the Aster Chain launch.”

ASTER is trading at around $0.70, down 10% in the past 24 hours to a market cap of approximately $1.7 billion, per CoinGecko. WLFI is down 3.5% over the same period.

Aster originally launched as ApolloX in 2021 and rebranded following a merger with Astherus in December 2024. The platform is incubated by YZi Labs, previously Binance’s venture arm, and received a high-profile boost when Binance co-founder CZ began promoting it on X, sending its token on a roughly 40x run.

Aster is currently the second-largest perp DEX by open interest after Hyperliquid, according to DeFiLlama, and recently launched the genesis phase of Aster Chain, a privacy-focused Layer 1 that uses ZK proofs to keep trades private by default.