For years, crypto markets have operated with a clear gap. DeFi introduced open and transparent trading, while centralized exchanges continued to handle most price discovery. The difference came down to infrastructure. Most blockchains focused on running applications, not high-speed trading. Order books, tight spreads, and real-time hedging demand fast execution and low costs, and that level of performance is now becoming non-negotiable.
At these volumes, the pressure on infrastructure becomes obvious. According to DeFiLlama, decentralized perpetual futures markets are now clearing roughly $20–30 billion in daily volume, with monthly volumes regularly approaching the $1 trillion range depending on market conditions.
As this trend accelerates, MegaETH, a high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built around ultra-low latency and high throughput, has gone live. Among the first flagship applications to launch on this Layer 2 network on February 17 was World Markets – a decentralized trading platform that unifies spot trading, perpetual futures, and lending under a single account.
As one of the first full trading platforms on the network, it effectively serves as an early test of whether performance-focused chains can support institutional-style market structure on-chain.
When Markets Outgrow the Infrastructure
For most of DeFi’s first wave, the focus was composability. Protocols stacked on top of each other, liquidity moved across AMMs, and lending markets thrived.
However, serious trading is different from yield farming.
Order books require constant updates. Market makers need predictable fees. High-frequency traders need execution that doesn’t lag behind centralized venues by seconds. Even small inefficiencies compound when leverage is involved.
That’s where many general-purpose chains struggled.
Gas fees on networks like Base or Arbitrum can fluctuate dramatically during congestion. Latency, even if acceptable for swaps or NFT mints, becomes a real issue when managing leveraged derivatives.
Kevin Coons, founder of World Markets, speaks candidly:
“There has yet to be a successful DEX on a general purpose chain. Two simple reasons are gas and speed. Gas costs can be close to 100x higher. High gas costs prevent market makers from being able to quote tight spreads meaning on-chain exchanges can’t be competitive with Binance, until now.”
Whether or not one agrees with the 100x comparison, the broader point resonates: tight spreads and fast execution aren’t optional features in capital markets. They’re the foundation.
Coons adds:
“Speed matters to an extent. Being within range of Binance is important for getting price discovery on-chain. MegaETH is the first chain where price discovery is possible.”
That statement speaks to a larger trend. If decentralized markets want to compete, they can’t just be transparent but efficient as well.
MegaETH and the Rise of Performance Chains
MegaETH has positioned itself differently from earlier Ethereum scaling efforts.
Instead of focusing only on cheaper gas, it emphasizes performance metrics closer to centralized systems, targeting very high throughput and low confirmation times. The project has publicly referenced stress tests processing billions of transactions ahead of mainnet launch.
Official docs and ecosystem materials emphasize execution speed specifically for latency-sensitive use cases like order books and gaming.
This approach aligns with a pattern seen elsewhere. Hyperliquid, another trading-focused environment, has become one of the most active perpetual futures venues onchain, frequently clearing billions in daily volume.
The takeaway is that markets seem to gravitate toward infrastructure built specifically for trading workloads. General-purpose chains aren’t disappearing but capital markets are starting to migrate toward environments designed for financial throughput.
What World Markets Is Trying to Change
World Markets enters this environment with a structural design choice: unified margin.
Instead of forcing traders to separate capital across spot markets, perpetual futures, and lending platforms, the system keeps everything under a single portfolio.
On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it opens the door to strategies that were previously difficult on-chain, including basis trades that exploit the structural gap between borrow rates and perpetual funding rates.
Traditional DeFi often leaves capital fragmented and heavily overcollateralized, forcing traders to split borrowing, hedging, and execution across separate platforms, with billions in capital sitting idle or locked inefficiently because the infrastructure never unified those functions.
World Markets attempts to consolidate all of that. The platform’s ATLAS risk engine enables portfolio-level margining and undercollateralized lending – mechanics more common in prime brokerage models than in early DeFi protocols.
In traditional finance, hedge funds operate under consolidated accounts where risk is assessed at the portfolio level. DeFi historically hasn’t worked that way.
World Markets is effectively attempting to replicate prime brokerage-style capital management on-chain, giving traders access to structures that have traditionally been reserved for institutional desks.
Rethinking Liquidations and Risk
Liquidation mechanics are one of the most controversial parts of leveraged trading.
Most exchanges, both centralized or decentralized, rely on automated systems that close positions once thresholds are breached. While necessary for solvency, those systems can override trader discretion.
World Markets frames its model differently. In Coons’ view:
“Sophisticated traders have highly leveraged portfolios. They reduce risk by hedging… Exchanges currently socialize these losses to their users by closing out their positions. On World Markets you have ultimate control over your risk. We don’t decide your risk for you.”
The idea is to give traders more direct control over counterparty exposure rather than relying entirely on exchange-imposed forced liquidations.
Whether that model scales will depend on adoption and liquidity depth. But structurally, it signals a move away from rigid, siloed liquidation logic toward portfolio-based risk management.
Where On-Chain Markets Are Heading
Zooming out, this moment is bigger than any single platform. Decentralized markets are beginning to outgrow the general-purpose infrastructure they were originally built on. DeFi’s first phase focused on access and composability. The next phase is about capital efficiency, execution quality, and market structure that can handle real trading volume.
According to Messari’s 2025 derivatives research, perpetual futures have become one of the largest segments of DeFi by volume, accounting for a significant share of total on-chain activity.
At that scale, performance stops being optional. Competing with centralized venues requires tighter spreads, faster execution, and deeper liquidity, all of which depend on infrastructure designed specifically for financial workloads.
MegaETH is aligning itself with that change, and World Markets’ launch represents one of the earliest attempts to run a fully integrated trading stack, including a central limit order book, on infrastructure designed specifically for high-speed financial execution. It signals a maturing phase for DeFi, where the chain itself becomes a strategic choice aligned with the demands of capital markets.
