Perp DEXs generally have to answer the same design question: where does trading fee revenue go first?
On LP-based perp venues, liquidity providers deposit the capital that acts as counterparty to trader positions, and in exchange, a share of fee revenue is allocated to compensate that capital. That's a reasonable design — LP capital is what makes the pool-based model work. It just means fee revenue has a claim on it before it reaches anyone else.
LeverUp is built on a different capital structure. There's no external LP pool in the settlement path — positions are settled through a protocol-managed virtual liquidity architecture, the VMMV, with execution and risk management handled at the protocol layer instead. (Full mechanics: LP-Free Perps: How Removing the Liquidity Provider Changes the Architecture.) That structural choice changes where fee revenue can go, because there's no external LP allocation to clear first.
Where the Revenue Goes Instead
Without an external LP pool with a standing claim on fee revenue, that revenue instead routes into $xLV staking distributions and the $yLV buyback mechanism, both open to LeverUp traders and covered in full in What is LeverUp?. The value trading activity generates doesn't clear an LP-compensation step first, because LeverUp's capital structure doesn't include that layer in the first place.
This is a capital structure difference, not a verdict on LP-based design. LP pools remain a proven way to bootstrap deep, readily available liquidity, and a number of large on-chain perp venues run on some version of that model. LeverUp's architecture is a different bet: that removing the LP layer, and routing what would have compensated it back into $xLV and $yLV instead, is worth the tradeoff of putting more weight on the VMMV, oracle quality, and protocol-level risk management to do the job LP capital would otherwise do.
Trade on LeverUp: app.leverup.xyz