dYdX

What is dYdX?  

• dYdx, as of March 2022, offers 29 perpetual markets including Litecoin, Enjin, Polygon, 0x, etc. 
• Being built on top of the Starkware layer-2 protocol enables the dYdX platform to offer gasless deposits and low transaction fees for users to submit their trades.
• Transactions settled on layer-2 utilizing zk-rollup resulting in a much higher trade throughput and lower transaction size.  
• dYdX was initiated in 2017 with its first product being a margin trading platform called Expo. The platform initially sourced liquidity from 0x until decided to build its own order book in late 2019. In 2020 the project decided to move into perpetual driven by the explosion of volume on perpetual led by Bitmex. The moves made dYdX the first project who build a perpetual platform in the form of DEX.   

Key Metrics

Ticker	DYDX
Token Name	dYdX
Token Type/Protocol	ERC20
Total Token Supply	1,000,000,000
Current Circulating Supply	See Coinmarketcap
Market Capitalisation	See Coinmarketcap
Token Creation Date	July 2021
Can it be mined?	No

Who is behind dYdX?

dYdX was first founded in 2017 by Antonio Juliano, a Princeton computer science graduate and a former software engineer at Uber and Coinbase. A16z and Polychain were the first investors to the project with a $2 million seed round and $10 million series A. In July 2021, dYdX Foundation was formed with council members including Arthur Cheong, Rebecca Rettig, and Markus Spillman.    

What is the purpose of dYdX?

DYDX is the governance token of the dYdX platform to enable decentralized governance by the token holders. The token can be used to participate in some staking pools to receive staking rewards from liquidity mining, and also receive trading fee discounts to trade on the dYdX DEX. 

Insights:

• dYdX is as of March 2022, among the most widely adopted DeFi protocol with around $2.6 billion daily trading volume and $960 million open interest.
• Starkware smart contract that is used by dYdX has been audited by PeckShield with no major vulnerabilities found.

Risks:

• As a DApp, dYdX value is highly dependent on the usage of the platform. There is a risk that the product dYdX currently has is becoming less attractive in the future due to innovation from other platforms or user behavior change. Hence, the platform needs to anticipate where the user preferences are heading and prepare necessary product innovations to maintain the market share.  
• dYdX is a decentralized exchange, however, the platform is actually not fully decentralized yet. There is still a central point of control from the team developing the project. Efforts to make the platform fully decentralized are ongoing and implementation is expected to occur in late 2022. 

News and Updates:

• In March 2022, dYdX is an opening whitelist for beta testing of the new app on iOs.
• dYdX in mid-January announced a reduction in the platform trading fees for as low as 0.020% for single-maker types of trades for tier I users. That is a 66% reduction from the previous structure to make the platform more competitive. The fee structure is planned to be revisited every three months. 
• dYdX is at the time of writing, as of March 2022, looking to expand to several regions such as Japan, India, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. 

Community & Whitepaper Links:

Official Website: https://dydx.exchange/ 
White Paper: https://docs.dydx.exchange/#general 

Disclaimer : 

All investment is speculative and involves substantial risk and uncertainty. Investors should understand the nature of digital assets including the terms of return and the risk of assets. We encourage investors to fully understand the assets and the risk associated with them prior to making any investment.