dYdX Now Accounts for More Than All Other DEX Trading Combined

Non-custodial exchange dYdX has climbed to the top of the DEX rankings by trading volume, beating out Uniswap, for the first time.

More than $9B has been exchanged on the trading platform in the last 24 hours, according to data provider CoinMarketCap. Uniswap’s V3 lands in second at $1.2B, the only other DEX to trade above one billion in the past day, and lags dYdX even when adding the almost $280,000 that was traded on Uniswap V2.

All other 104 DEXs listed on CoinMarketCap have traded a total of $5.4B in the past day, or about half of dYdX’s volume.

The a16z-backed DEX founded in 2017 by ex-Coinbase and Uber engineer Antonio Juliano, is also beating Coinbase, the largest centralized US crypto exchange, which has traded over $3B in the past 24 hours.

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Token Rewards

dYdX has been distributing rewards of its DYDX token, for both trading and providing liquidity on its platform, which is likely a major factor in driving the growth. Earlier this month, it airdropped more than $1B to over 64,000 users.

David Gogel, head of growth at the dYdX Foundation, a non-profit steward of the project, said rewards and dYdX’s use of Layer 2 scaling explain the latest momentum.

DYDX token has doubled in price in the last two weeks, climbing to an all-time high of over $22 on Monday.

Unlike other top DEXs like Uniswap and Curve, which work by automatically swapping tokens among liquidity pools, dYdX uses a more centralized order book.

Derivatives Trading

As a macro trend, trading on derivatives exchanges may start to rival that of spot trading in DeFi, just like it has in centralized crypto trading.

“A core thesis of ours, which seems to be playing out, has been that the overall crypto market would transition to decentralized perpetual exchanges,” Corey Miller, senior growth associate at dYdX Trading, the for-profit entity behind dYdX, told The Defiant.

Changes in how tokens are distributed going forward will depend on the community, Gogel said.

“Trading rewards and staking rewards were initialized to be distributed over 5 years. But [the] community now controls the contracts and can change any of the rewards and pools existing at launch,” he said.