I listened to Aster CEO @Leonard_Aster latest interview. The most interesting part wasn’t the usual “we’re growing” talk. It was how Aster sees its next phase. A few things stood out 👇 1/ Aster doesn’t want to remain just another perp DEX. The long-term goal is to become the liquidity infrastructure underneath other products. Regional frontends, wallets, AI agents and other apps could all plug into Aster liquidity without users necessarily interacting with Aster directly. That’s a much bigger ambition than simply competing for perp volume. 2/ AOS could be an important part of this. With the Aster Open Standard, third parties can permissionlessly deploy markets, provide liquidity and keep the fees generated by those markets. Instead of Aster deciding what every market should look like, the idea is to let an ecosystem of deployers compete on top of the same infrastructure. 3/ Leonard also made an interesting point about metrics: He cares more about active, fee-paying traders than headline volume. Volume can be gamed. Users who repeatedly come back and actually pay fees are much harder to fake. Aster’s near-term target: 100K+ daily active traders. 4/ Another shift worth watching is incentives. Leonard basically said the era of perp DEXs endlessly giving away their own token to generate volume is ending. The model Aster wants instead: Projects bring their own incentives → distribute them to Aster traders → use Aster as the liquidity/distribution layer. USD1/WLFI is the first visible example. 5/ And this is probably the key quote from the whole interview: Aster spent year one catching up. Now Leonard says they’ve largely reached feature parity with the major DEXs/CEXs. The next phase has to be differentiation. So the Aster thesis from here isn't really: “Can it build another good perp DEX?” It’s: “Can Aster become infrastructure that other trading products build on?” That’s the part I’d be watching.