PerpTools – How DEXTools Is Building the Full DeFi Trading Stack

Wael Rajab is the CMO of PerpTools and co-founder and director of DEXT Ventures, the capital arm of DEXTools — one of DeFi’s original and most widely used on-chain trading and analytics platforms. With nearly a decade in crypto and a portfolio spanning over 100 investments across 150+ integrated blockchains, Wael has been at the centre of decentralised finance’s growth from data dashboard to full trading stack.

Why you should listen

DEXTools built its reputation as the go-to platform for on-chain token analytics — the place traders head when they want to understand what’s happening across chains without needing to be technically fluent. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. DEX volumes have grown nearly eightfold in two years, from $81 billion to roughly $740 billion, and perpetuals trading has become one of the most contested battlegrounds in DeFi. PerpTools is DEXTools’ answer: a native perps vertical that gives millions of existing users the ability to trade derivatives without ever leaving the platform they already trust.

What makes the PerpTools story compelling isn’t just the product — it’s the distribution. Most new perp DEXs face a brutal cold-start problem, spending heavily on user acquisition with uncertain results. PerpTools launched into an established audience and reached 40,000 users and over $150 million in traded volume within weeks of its beta. Built on Orderly’s shared order book and liquidity layer, the platform is designed for speed and capital efficiency, with sub-200 millisecond latency and leverage up to 100x — all self-custodial and permissionless.

The roadmap is where things get genuinely interesting. AI trading agents — back-tested to average 20% monthly returns — are being rolled out in tranches to top community members, with copy trading and vault-based strategies to follow. Prediction markets, a tap-to-earn trading game, and a token generation event targeted within six to eight months round out a product pipeline designed to make the platform as sticky as possible. Wael also opens up on competing in a space where Hyperliquid looms large, the strategic logic behind the Orderly partnership, and why DeFi’s permissionless, borderless architecture represents a genuine levelling of the financial playing field.