dYdX

dYdX has been rebuilt three times. The first versions were Ethereum smart contracts for margin trading and lending, and the "solo margin" contracts of that era are where many DeFi developers first met flash loans. v3 moved perpetuals to a StarkEx layer-2 with an order book run by the company. v4, the current version, is its own Cosmos-SDK chain: every validator keeps an in-memory order book, and only matched trades are written to blocks.

Collateral is USDC. The chain added governance-listed spot trading for Solana tokens in December 2025, which is what a search for "dYdX swap" now lands on: buy and sell Solana assets from the same interface as the perps.

On 30 June 2026 Antonio Juliano announced Arcus, an exchange built by dYdX Labs and Robinhood Crypto on Robinhood Chain, offering 24/7 trading in 95 stock tokens and 35 real-world-asset perps. Eddie Zhang, who joined through the July 2025 acquisition of the Telegram trading bot Pocket Protector, is Arcus's CEO; Juliano moved to its board (dYdX blog).

His explanation was blunt: the dYdX Chain "achieved real decentralization" but "performance and user experience suffered" and competitors took share. The same post says v4 "will continue to be supported" and funds and positions stay accessible, and that a slice of any future Arcus token is reserved for dYdX traders, stakers and validators.

• Dec 2025: Solana spot trading launches; US users allowed for spot only, perps still geo-blocked.
• Nov 2025: governance raises the DYDX buyback to up to 75% of net fees.
• Oct 2025: chain halts for 7 h 43 min during the 10 October crash (see incidents).
• Jul 2025: dYdX Trading buys Pocket Protector; Eddie Zhang becomes President.
• Jun 2025: dYdX Trading absorbs the Foundation's marketing, BD and solutions teams.

Arcus is a separate venue with its own restricted-country list (US, Canada, UK among them). Positions on dYdX do not move there automatically.

Three bodies share the name. dYdX Trading Inc. (the developer, branded dYdX Labs) wrote the open-source software and, since June 2025, also runs marketing and business development taken over from the foundation. dYdX International Ltd. is the entity named in the current site footer. The dYdX Foundation stewards the ecosystem, and the chain itself is governed by DYDX stakers, who vote on listings, fee parameters, the insurance fund and buybacks.

Antonio Juliano founded dYdX in 2017, stepped back as CEO in 2024 and returned in January 2025, writing that he would run the company personally in "founder mode". Eighteen months later he handed day-to-day leadership of the successor project to Eddie Zhang. He describes himself as the largest DYDX holder.

Perpetuals are priced on a maker-taker schedule by 30-day volume. The entry tier is 0.05% taker and 0.01% maker, with lower rates for bigger traders and discounts for staked DYDX (dYdX help centre). Placing and cancelling orders costs no gas; deposits and withdrawals through bridges can cost cents to a few dollars depending on the route.

Fees are collected in USDC. Since proposal #313 passed in November 2025, up to 75% of net protocol fees buy DYDX on the market and stake it; 5% goes to the Treasury SubDAO and 5% to MegaVault, the protocol's liquidity vault. dYdX reported $46M of net protocol revenue for 2024.

The numbers that matter for a trader are open interest (how much is actually at stake on the book) and the insurance fund (what absorbs losses before anyone else does). In October 2025 the insurance fund held about $16M, per dYdX's own incident report. The fund has been drawn before: in November 2023 a YFI squeeze on v3 cost it roughly $9M, about 40% of what v3's fund held at the time.

For live TVL and open interest the chain's figures move daily; DeFiLlama and the dYdX Chain explorers carry them. The long-run trend is the one Juliano himself described in June 2026: share lost to faster venues, which is why the builders moved on.