Event Timeline
About dYdX
dYdX is the original institutional-grade decentralized perpetuals exchange, founded in 2017 by Antonio Juliano, a former engineer at Coinbase and Uber. Built on StarkEx, a ZK-rollup L2 by StarkWare, it delivered near-zero gas fees and fast execution at a time when Ethereum mainnet gas costs made DeFi unusable for active traders. Backed by a16z, Paradigm, and Coinbase Ventures, it became the largest perp DEX in the world through 2021 and 2022, processing billions in monthly volume before Hyperliquid overtook it.
The September 2021 DYDX airdrop was the first major perp DEX token distribution and wrote the playbook every protocol since has followed. Users who had traded on the platform before July 26, 2021 received allocations based on their cumulative volume, ranging from 310 DYDX for the smallest traders to 9,529 DYDX for the highest-volume accounts. At the intraday high of $14.24 on launch day, the airdrop was worth between $4,414 and $135,692 per user, with some early reports of wallets receiving over $50,000. In 2023, dYdX migrated to its own Cosmos appchain (V4), becoming fully decentralized with community-run validators.
How Was It Distributed, Airdrop Distribution Stats
Project Fundamentals
| MetricValue | |
| Category | Perp DEX |
| Chain | dYdX Chain (Cosmos SDK), previously StarkEx L2 |
| Token | DYDX |
| Total Supply | 1,000,000,000 DYDX |
| Token Price at TGE | $10.28 (open), $14.24 (intraday high) |
| All-Time High | ~$26.80 (Nov 2021) |
| Funding | $87M+, a16z, Paradigm, Polychain, Coinbase Ventures |
| Products | Perpetuals, spot, margin, lending |
| Monthly Volume at TGE | $13.8B |
How the dYdX airdrop worked
Check Eligibility
Complete Epoch 0 Trading Milestones
Claim from September 8, 2021
Stake for Ongoing Rewards
Was the dYdX ( DYDX) airdrop worth it?
- Volume was the only input. Allocation tiers tracked historical trading on the exchange, so the distribution went to people who had actually used it rather than to anyone who had held a token or bridged once.
- The top tiers were exceptional. The lowest tier received around $4,414 at launch prices and the highest ran past $135,000, one of the widest spreads of any major distribution.
- A large part of the user base could not claim. dYdX geo blocked the United States, so a significant share of the traders who had built the volume the airdrop rewarded were excluded from it.
dYdX ( DYDX) Official Links
Official channels, documentation and community for this airdrop:
This airdrop has concluded. It is kept for research rather than participation.
