Aster was born from the merger of two projects in late 2024: Astherus (a DeFi yield-product protocol that received seed funding from YZi Labs, formerly Binance Labs, in November 2024) and APX Finance (a decentralized derivatives trading protocol) combined into a single platform.
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The project is backed by YZi Labs; in September 2025, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, Binance's founder, confirmed he serves in an advisory role, focused on product development.
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September 17, 2025: the token generation event (TGE), with APX tokens converted 1:1 — the opening price was roughly $0.08–0.10.
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September 24, 2025: barely a week after the TGE, the price reaches an all-time high of roughly $2.41–2.42 — extreme, few-day volatility.
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October 2025: following its Binance listing and “Rocket Launch” campaigns, the platform's derivatives trading volume grew 8x within a month; during the token's launch and the rollout of its Hidden Orders feature, Aster briefly surpassed Hyperliquid in daily volume and fee generation.
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Nov 2, 2025: CZ personally purchases 2 million ASTER tokens, triggering a 20% price jump that day.
The “Hidden Orders” feature is no coincidence: back in June 2025, before Aster*'*s launch, CZ publicly proposed building “dark pool”-style DEXs to protect large traders from coordinated market manipulation enabled by visible order books — Aster is a practical implementation of that concept.