DYDX

dYdX is the world's first decentralized digital currency derivatives trading platform. The platform aims to build more open, transparent and secure financial products through decentralized technologies, and will develop regulatory compliance methods on its platform.

dYdX open protocol is based on 0X, Ethereum and is driven by smart contracts. Unlike other popular AMM models in the DeFi derivatives trading protocol, dYdX uses a relatively traditional order book model to provide users with a top-level order type.

On August 30, 2021, the trading volume of dYdX in nearly 24 hours exceeded $1.04 billion, surpassing PancakeSwap V2 and Uniswap V3, ranking the first in the DEX trading volume list.

dYdX has both advantages and disadvantages.

I. Advantages: Order book mode and decentralized contract mode. In the decentralized derivatives world, there are not many exchanges that offer permanent contracts at the moment, and dYdX's advantage is clear. Compared with a centralized exchange, dYdX does not have to worry about platforms doing evil, misappropriating users' assets, running away, etc., which can avoid many potential moral hazards. In addition, dYdX transactions do not require KYC, requiring only an Ethereum wallet and a connection to start transactions, eliminating tedious authentication steps.

< STRONG > Advantages over DEX: From the perspective of the business model, dYdX can not be simply defined as DEX. The data of its lending service is very bright -- the loan pool has issued a total of 17.4 billion DOLLARS of loans in 2020. Compared with the AMM DEX on the market, dYdX of the order book model not only has richer service types, but also has the closest use experience to the traditional CEX. For example, spot trading, margin trading and contract trading all support market price, limit price, stop loss and other Settings. In terms of why they chose the order book, the dYdX team believes that the order book has had a lot of success in the history of cryptocurrency trading and is more commonly used by traditional market makers. In addition, compared with CEX, dYdX's "off-chain matching + on-chain settlement" design solves the former's security and transparency problems, but also ensures higher performance and response speed, enough to support a larger user flow.

At present, the biggest limitation is that it supports too few trading pairs. Regardless of spot, loan or derivative business, except stablecoin trading pair, dYdX only provides spot and leveraged trading services of ETH, BTC and LINK, which fails to fully meet the diversified investment needs of users and is difficult to compete with other platforms. The development of the specific business is also lagging. The spot business is not able to compete with Uniswap, and the lending business lags far behind the head lending platforms like Compound, so there may be some opportunities in the future if the platform can maintain its strength in the derivatives business.

Second, the order book model requires sufficient user volume and transaction depth. Uniswap adopted the AMM model to solve the liquidity problem of small currency and achieve a cold start, while the order model is difficult to attract small and medium-sized projects, which is one of the reasons for dYdX's slow development. Finally, there is the problem of handling fee. DYdX adopts the mode of off-chain transaction and on-chain settlement. Although dYdX puts the transaction matching outside the chain, most operations still need to be completed on the chain. It's much higher than a centralized exchange, which is not friendly to small users, and this has limited dYdX's further development to a certain extent.

dYdX has mentioned several times recently that it will soon bring more new assets online. DYdX is also working with Layer 2 expansion project StarkWare to integrate their Layer 2 technology into dYdX contract products to further improve performance and address high gas transaction fees.

On June 16, 2021, dYdX raised $65 million in series C funding. Paradigm led the round, Wintermute Trading, Three Arrows Capital, StarkWare, Sixtant, QCP Capital, Polychain, MGNr.io, Menai Financial Group, Kronos Research, HashKey, Finlink Capital, Electric Capital, Delphi Digital, CMT Digital, CMS Holdings and Andreessen Horowitz contributed. The money will be used to add new assets and features to the exchange's permanent contracts, launch new mobile apps, continue to invest in international expansion and double the size of its 16-person team over the next year.

On August 3, 2021, dYdX announced the launch of the governance token dYdX and airdropped addresses previously interacted with on the platform. The total amount of governance tokens was 1 billion, and airdrop accounted for 7.5%, namely 75 million DYDX airdrop awards.

DyDX said it had taken a snapshot of all historical dyDX users on July 26, and a total of 36,203 users were eligible for airdrops. DYdX allocates the number of historical users to receive according to the volume of historical transactions. If 787 addresses have transaction volume over $1 million before the snapshot, each address can receive 9,529.86 dYdX.