Backing and Valuation Ahead of the Token Drop Crypto derivatives platforms usually struggle with a chicken-or-egg problem: without deep liquidity, traders stay away, and without active trader
Crypto derivatives platforms usually struggle with a chicken-or-egg problem: without deep liquidity, traders stay away, and without active traders, market makers look elsewhere. PERPTools aims to bypass that hurdle entirely. The decentralized derivatives platform, built by the same core team behind charting giant DEXTools, has pulled in $8 million across two rounds of token financing as it gears up for a fourth-quarter 2026 launch.
Cash began flowing in late 2025. A $3 million pre-seed round closed in December at a $30 million fully diluted valuation, led by DEXTools Ventures and Orderly Network. Soon after, an additional $5 million seed round wrapped up in early 2026 at an $80 million fully diluted valuation. Backers in the second slate include BigBrain Holdings, NEAR, Animoca Brands, Sfermion, and Shima Capital. Because these are token valuations rather than conventional equity stakes, the headline numbers reflect future coin distributions rather than company shares.
Building an exchange from scratch is brutal work. PERPTools plans to lean heavily on existing plumbing instead. The exchange runs on Orderly Network’s omnichain central-limit-order-book architecture. This setup lets users tap into a shared pool of capital across different blockchains without wrestling with risky bridge protocols.
Distribution matters just as much as plumbing. CEO Evgen Tokarev claims the platform has already logged $240 million in beta volume (a figure that has not been independently verified). The broader pitch rests on folding perpetual contract execution directly into DEXTools, which commands a massive audience of roughly 30 million traders. If even a small slice of that audience converts into active perpetual traders, the platform avoids the cold-start trap that kills most new decentralized exchanges.
Rather than waiting for the official token release, PERPTools has already rolled out three distinct tools:
Perp DEX: Traders get access to leveraged long and short positions with cross-margin trading, settled across Orderly's shared books.
AI Arena: A marketplace where users can build autonomous trading bots simply by typing instructions in plain English. Creators establish risk profiles, leverage caps, and rules; other traders can pool USDC into top-performing agents tracked by a 30-day onchain profit-and-loss leaderboard.
Tap Prediction: A gamified micro-betting product tied to live perpetual feeds. Bets start at just $0.10, with payouts running as high as 25 times the initial wager. The company claims a prize pool topping $1 million, though it has not shared the math behind that pool or detailed its current earnings.
A splashy valuation only goes so far once real money is on the line. While an $80 million fully diluted valuation offers an early benchmark, PERPTools has withheld vital metrics: total token supply, unlock schedules, insider vesting, and trading fee splits remain unknown.
The decentralized derivatives arena is already crowded with entrenched competitors, and execution quality hinges on whether order books hold up when market volatility spikes. Add to that the fact that PERPTools has not published verified active user counts or market depth data. The coming months will reveal whether automated trading bots and built-in charting traffic are enough to build a lasting derivatives powerhouse, or if the venture will simply blend into the noise of crypto's next token launch cycle.
PERPTools is a decentralized derivatives trading ecosystem engineered by the minds behind DEXTools. Designed to lower the barriers to on-chain finance, the platform merges deep omnichain liquidity with autonomous, natural-language AI trading agents and accessible prediction markets. By integrating directly into DEXTools’ existing analytics suite, PERPTools offers traders non-custodial cross-margin perpetuals, automated strategy execution, and seamless multi-chain settlement without the friction of conventional bridging.
