Mainstream Perp DEX Overview: Most platforms see increased trading volume, with Hyperliquid's open interest experiencing a slight uptick

Garrett Jin (@GarrettBullish), the largest $ZEC short, currently holds 202,078 $ZEC ($312.8M). He withdrew the 202,078 $ZEC from #Binance 9 months ago when the price was $437. He's now sitting on a $224.5M unrealized profit on $ZEC spot!

Robinhood Chain’s fee revenue plummeted from a peak of roughly $8 million daily in early September (13.1 million transactions, averaging 64 cents per trade) to approximately $230,000 on September 16 (8.9 million transactions, just 2.6 cents per trade)—a 97% drop. Over the same period, transaction volume fell only 32%, while the 7-day average fee declined 82% and transaction count slipped 6%, meaning the fee decline far outstripped the drop in activity. Despite this collapse in on-chain fees, actual trading activity has not receded in lockstep. For the week ending September 16, Robinhood ecosystem DEX trading volume stood at around $13 billion, up 5% week-over-week; stablecoin supply dipped just 1% to roughly $1 billion. Revenue generated by on-chain applications still exceeds that of the network itself: over the past 24 hours, applications collectively collected approximately $8 million in fees, retaining $1.5 million in revenue. Token launch platform Pons recorded weekly trading volume of about $616 million, down 37% week-over-week, with protocol revenue falling from $10.7 million to $5.8 million.

On-chain detective ZachXBT has published a post questioning the ZEC ecosystem NFT project zkSNARKs, describing it as a generic 10,000-piece PFP NFT collection that raised eight-figure US dollars but lacks practical utility and ecosystem development, with doubts over the team's fund allocation and royalty mechanisms. On September 18, the ZEC ecosystem NFT project zkSNARKs announced the completion of its auction, which received a total of 16,971 bids, with 8,000 NFTs allocated and a final clearing settlement price floor of 1.5 ZEC. It is reported that the auction adopted a uniform-price sealed-bid format: bids were ranked from highest to lowest, the top 8,000 bids won, and unsuccessful bidders received full refunds. It is worth noting that @LeonidasNFT, a prominent builder from the Bitcoin Inscriptions era, publicly accused the zkSNARKs team of being serial "entrepreneurs" in the Ordinals space, with most of their projects being scams.

Renowned crypto analyst PlanB wrote in a post that Bitcoin has climbed above the 50-week moving average (around $79,000), with its next target being the 100-week moving average (roughly $89,000). PlanB also stated he has personally confirmed the end of the bear market, noting Bitcoin closed at $78,571 in August, multiple key indicators have improved: the proportion of Bitcoin in profit rose from 50% to 72%, and the monthly RSI climbed from 41 to 51. He thus concluded the market bottom is in, with a bullish outlook ahead.

UBS’s latest estimates indicate that global AI capital expenditure will hit $998 billion in 2026, nearly doubling from $506 billion in 2025, and climbing further to $1.447 trillion in 2027. This sharp upward revision is driven primarily by the rapid surge in memory prices, rather than an overall expansion of infrastructure investment scale. Memory spending will jump from $71 billion in 2025 to $367 billion in 2026, then expand to $923 billion in 2027; over the same period, non-memory AI capital expenditure will reach roughly $631 billion in 2026, but fall back to $525 billion in 2027. The share of memory in total AI capital expenditure will rise from around 14% in 2025 to 37% in 2026, and jump further to 64% in 2027. UBS calculates that about 60% of the year-on-year increase in AI capital expenditure in 2026 comes from rising memory costs. In 2027, incremental memory spending will even exceed the total net increase in overall AI capital expenditure, as spending on other components declines during the same period. Of the nearly $1 trillion total increase between 2025 and 2027, roughly 90% is attributable to higher memory spending. UBS specifically notes that if the incremental spending is driven mainly by price hikes, its boost to U.S. real GDP will be quite limited, instead largely translating to a transfer of revenue and profits to Asian memory manufacturers, thereby delivering a more direct positive contribution to the GDP of those economies. The world’s major memory producers are concentrated in Asia, meaning that as the AI investment cycle deepens, the Asian memory industry chain may benefit more than the market previously expected. This structural shift signals that the economic driver of the AI investment cycle is moving beyond simple expansion of infrastructure scale to rising costs of key components required to support more powerful computing systems, and investors’ tracking framework for AI capital expenditure will also need to adjust accordingly.

Analyst Miller Cole noted that one Bitcoin is currently worth roughly 18.55 ounces of gold. At this time last month, one Bitcoin was only equivalent to about 15.3 ounces of gold. This ratio has once again crossed above the 50-week simple moving average, indicating a bullish signal. The analyst believes the BTC/XAU pair will reach notable new highs in the coming years.