George Town, British Virgin Islands, January 14th, 2026
Aster, the high-performance and privacy-focused on-chain trading platform backed by YZi Labs, has announced the final results of its “Human vs AI” live trading competition. Conducted over a two-week period under highly volatile market conditions, the event highlighted a clear contrast between discretionary human trading and AI-driven strategies.
While individual human trader ProMint secured the top ranking with positive net profits, the human trading team as a whole recorded an overall ROI of -32.22%, reflecting significant performance dispersion across participants. In contrast, AI agents delivered materially more stable results at the aggregate level, limiting total losses to approximately USD 13,000 and achieving an overall ROI of -4.48% across all participating AI strategies.
Trading Insight: Stability vs Asymmetric Opportunity
Competition data highlighted a clear contrast in risk behavior between human traders and AI agents. During the event, 43% of human participants were liquidated, while all 30 AI agents completed the competition without a single liquidation, achieving a 100% survival rate.
According to Aster, the results underscore the structural strengths of AI-driven strategies in stable, risk-controlled market environments, where systematic execution and disciplined risk management help mitigate large drawdowns. At the same time, the findings also suggest that in market conditions driven by human emotion, rapid market shifts, and nonlinear price dynamics, discretionary human traders with strong judgment and narrative awareness can still capture asymmetric opportunities and outperform purely systematic approaches.
Future Competitiveness Lies in Collaboration, Not Replacement
Competition data showed that human traders exhibited significantly wider performance dispersion, with individual gains exceeding USD 19,000 and losses in other cases approaching USD 18,000, resulting in higher overall return volatility.
Aster emphasized that the “Human vs AI” showdown was designed not to determine replacement, but to clarify evolving roles. AI is becoming a foundational tool for execution and risk management, while human traders increasingly contribute judgment, context awareness, and narrative interpretation in complex market conditions. As a result, Aster believes future competitiveness will be driven by collaboration between humans and AI, rather than direct confrontation.
Aster: Using the Market as a Real-World Testing Ground
Aster stated that the initial goal of hosting this live trading showdown was to observe how different trading participants behave on the same decentralized infrastructure under real market conditions, rather than relying on backtesting or simulated data.
As the decentralized derivatives market continues to grow, Aster will continue to explore infrastructure designs that better serve professional trading needs, enabling strategies, risk management, and execution to achieve higher certainty on-chain.
“This was not a competition with a predetermined conclusion, but a starting point,” said Leonard, CEO of Aster, in the post-event summary. “As markets become more complex, traders need more than individual tools. They need integrated systems that can evolve alongside the market.”
The Next Trading Showdown Begins on Jan 22
Aster has confirmed that the next live trading showdown will officially kick off on January 22 and take place on the Aster Chain Testnet.
This upcoming event will open participation to a newly expanded group of traders, including professional participants from around the world, enabling live competitive trading within Aster’s testnet environment.
Additional details regarding competition mechanics, rewards, and participation criteria are available in Aster’s official X competition announcement.
About Aster
Aster is an on-chain trading platform offering high-performance perpetual and spot trading with MEV-aware trading mechanics, advanced order types such as Hidden Orders, and a protected trading mode, Shield Mode, across multiple chains. Beyond trading, Aster enables greater capital efficiency through Trade & Earn and supports ecosystem growth via Rocket Launch, which connects real traders with early-stage liquidity opportunities. Backed by YZi Labs, Aster is building toward its own Aster Chain and is currently running a multi-stage airdrop and incentive program to support its global community.
Users can learn more at the Aster official website or connect with Aster on the official X account.