Why Antarctic?

Our Vision

The perpetual futures market remains highly concentrated on centralized exchanges (CEXs). While CEXs offer mature execution and product breadth, they also introduce structural trade-offs in custody, privacy, and conflicts of interest. In parallel, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) improve self-custody and transparency, yet often require fragmented tooling and still fall short of the execution quality expected by active traders.

Antarctic (AX) is built to narrow this gap: delivering CEX-grade execution and usability while maintaining non-custodial settlement and open, non-discretionary access.

Limitations of Centralized Exchanges

CEXs typically require users to entrust assets to a third party, exposing them to custodial risk and platform-level operational failures. In addition, trading activity on CEXs is commonly subject to extensive monitoring, where user data may be collected, analyzed, and monetized. This can create incentives that are misaligned with end users, particularly when execution quality and market-making arrangements are opaque.

Limitations of Today’s DeFi Trading Experience

DEX users benefit from self-custody, but the broader DeFi trading stack remains fragmented. Traders may need to coordinate across multiple dApps, bridges, and custom workflows, increasing operational complexity and error risk. In many cases, traders also face limitations in liquidity depth, advanced order types, and professional-grade tooling—constraints that can reduce strategy effectiveness and widen the performance gap versus CEXs.

What Antarctic Delivers

AX is designed as a venue where users are not positioned as exit liquidity, and where market operations are governed by transparent, rules-based mechanisms. The platform prioritizes:

• Fair and verifiable execution supported by deep liquidity and robust price discovery

• Non-custodial settlement with clear, auditable system behavior

• A CEX-level user experience without sacrificing decentralization

• A framework that enables users to participate, own, and grow with the network over time