George Town, British Virgin Islands, September 28th, 2026 — Aster, the privacy-first onchain trading platform backed by YZi Labs, today announced the launch of its Liquidity Pool Mining campaign, a four-week incentive program carrying a total reward pool of up to 140,000 $ASTER. Running from September 28 to October 25, 2026 (UTC), the campaign is open to all Aster users running Perpetual Grid strategies on eligible trading pairs and marks the rollout of the platform's upgraded Perpetual Grid 2.0.

Grid trading is an automated strategy that places buy and sell orders at preset intervals within a defined price range, letting a position be worked continuously without constant manual oversight. Liquidity mining, in turn, is a widely used incentive model in decentralized finance in which a protocol allocates token rewards to users for designated activity such as trading. Rewards in this campaign will be distributed hourly based on each eligible Grid's share of trading volume. The base reward pool is set at 10,000 $ASTER per epoch, with additional rewards available depending on market conditions and trading activity on the platform. Participation is automatic, with no registration required.

"As Aster continues to bring more emerging assets and opportunities onchain, we're also focused on building the tools traders to navigate increasingly dynamic markets," said Leonard, CEO at Aster. "Perpetual Grid offers a flexible way to capture opportunities amid market volatility, and Grid 2.0 takes this experience further with greater flexibility and independence. This upgrade is another step toward our broader vision of building the frontier of onchain trading."

Incentivizing Automated Perpetual Trading

The campaign builds on Aster's expanded Perpetual Grid infrastructure, giving users a new way to take part in automated trading while earning additional $ASTER rewards from eligible Grid activity. Both Maker and Taker volume count toward the campaign (maker orders add new liquidity to a market, while taker orders fill existing liquidity), while manual trading and activity outside the Grid strategy are excluded.

Reward structures that allocate payouts in proportion to each participant's share of volume are a common design in liquidity mining, directing token incentives toward the activity that contributes most to a given market. An Estimated Bonus APY is also displayed, offering an indication of potential annualized $ASTER rewards based on recent campaign activity. The estimate can change as trading volume, participating Grids and other campaign conditions shift, and it does not guarantee future rewards or returns.

Grid 2.0 Separates Automated and Manual Strategies

Alongside the campaign, the newly upgraded Perpetual Grid 2.0 enables Grid strategies to operate independently from users' regular Perpetual trading. Each Grid runs through a dedicated Grid Bot subaccount, keeping its positions and margin separate from the main Perpetual account, a subaccount structure commonly used to segregate automated strategies from discretionary trading.

With support for both Cross and Isolated Margin, users can run automated Grid strategies while continuing to trade Perpetuals manually, including on the same trading pair. Under cross margin, collateral is shared across positions, while isolated margin confines collateral to each position separately; Isolated Margin supports up to 50 independent Grid strategies per account, with no per-pair limit.

Discover Strategies Through Grid Marketplace

Aster's Grid Marketplace simplifies strategy discovery by allowing users to browse active Grid strategies and review metrics such as PnL, ROI, runtime, price range, leverage and trading activity. Marketplace browsing and copy features of this kind have become a common discovery layer across trading platforms. Users can adopt an existing strategy as a starting point through Copy, or switch its direction through Reverse, turning a Long strategy into Short or vice versa. Copied or reversed strategies remain independent from their source and do not automatically synchronize with the original Grid.

Eligible Pairs and Reward Distribution

The Liquidity Pool Mining campaign is available on designated eligible trading pairs, with Week 1 eligible pairs including OURA/USD1, POLYMARKET/USD1 and META/USD1, each quoted against the USD1 stablecoin. The reward pool is shared across participating pairs, and individual rewards are determined by each Grid's eligible trading volume relative to the total eligible volume generated during the relevant hourly period. More eligible trading pairs may be added in subsequent weeks to reflect the latest market trends. Full details on the campaign, eligible trading pairs and current campaign parameters are available on the official campaign page.

About Aster

Aster is a privacy-first onchain trading platform backed by YZi Labs, featuring tools such as Hidden Orders that protect user trading activity. It offers perpetual futures, spot and earn products for top-trending assets, including RWAs (real-world assets), memes and core crypto markets, and is powered by Aster Chain, a Layer 1 blockchain built to power the future of decentralized finance. More information is available on the official website, and updates are shared on X.

Media Contact: Lola Chen, Marketing Manager, lola.chen@asterdex.com