If you were building a trading platform three years ago, Ethereum mainnet wasn’t even on the list. Fees were brutal. Blocks were packed. And high-frequency trading on layer-1 felt like lighting money on fire.
That’s changing. And Synthetix is betting on it.
The perpetuals platform is moving back to Ethereum mainnet after a three-year break, something founder Kain Warwick says simply wasn’t possible before. Back when perp DEXs started taking off, Ethereum was too congested to handle the load. Today, he argues, it’s finally ready.
LATEST: ⚡ Synthetix is launching a perp DEX on the Ethereum mainnet after a three-year absence from the L1, starting with a private beta that supports Bitcoin, ETH and Solana markets. pic.twitter.com/07WlhKqQei
— Vinanca (@LVitolo28224) December 20, 2025
What’s surprising isn’t that Synthetix left mainnet. It’s that no major perpetual DEX ever really came back. Warwick calls that unusual. In his view, Ethereum layer-1 is now the best place to run serious financial infrastructure again.
For years, the math didn’t work.
High gas fees made complex trading systems inefficient. Every transaction chipped away at liquidity and pricing. That’s why Synthetix moved to Optimism in 2022, and later expanded to Arbitrum and Base. dYdX followed a similar path, shifting to StarkEx to escape mainnet costs.
Warwick was blunt about it. When fees get too high, market efficiency breaks down. At some point, it’s not just expensive , it’s unusable.
Fast forward to today, and the numbers tell a very different story.
On Wednesday, Ethereum’s average gas fee was about 0.71 gwei. A year ago, it was 18.85 gwei. That’s roughly 26 times cheaper. Combine that with layer-2 scaling and protocol upgrades, and suddenly mainnet looks viable again for critical infrastructure.
And it’s not stopping here.
Some Ethereum developers expect even more capacity in 2026. Educator Anthony Sassano recently pointed out that plans to raise Ethereum’s gas limit to 180 million next year should be seen as a baseline, not a ceiling.
Warwick thinks this opens the door for more platforms to follow Synthetix’s lead.
Ethereum still holds most of crypto’s liquidity. Most assets live there. Most margin lives there. From a pure market efficiency standpoint, running perps where the liquidity already exists makes sense. And now, the network finally has room for it.
He also credits 2025 as a turning point for Ethereum’s development. In his words, it may be the network’s best year since the Merge in 2022, with teams focusing more on what builders actually need instead of abstract roadmap debates.
Warwick even joked that it wouldn’t feel like a real Synthetix launch unless someone tried to copy it within 20 minutes.
The bigger picture is clear. Ethereum’s economics have shifted. Infrastructure has caught up. And for the first time in years, layer-1 isn’t just usable again; it’s competitive.
