dYdX ( DYDX)

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.

Project Fundamentals

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Step 1 :

Check Eligibility

Visit the dYdX retroactive rewards dashboard at dydx.community and connect your MetaMask wallet. If eligible, your allocation tier appeared under "Allocation" showing how many DYDX you could earn.

Step 2 :

Complete Epoch 0 Trading Milestones

To unlock the airdrop, users had to hit specific trading milestones on the dYdX L2 perpetuals platform during Epoch 0 (Aug 3 – Aug 31, 2021). Milestones scaled by tier — Tier 1 users ($1–$10K historical volume) needed just 1 trade on L2 to unlock their 310 DYDX.

Step 3 :

Claim from September 8, 2021

After Epoch 0 ended, DYDX became transferable at 15:00 UTC on September 8. Users visited dydx.community to claim. Tokens appeared in the connected wallet immediately after transaction confirmation.

Step 4 :

Stake for Ongoing Rewards

After claiming, users could stake DYDX in the Safety Pool or USDC in the Liquidity Pool to earn continuous DYDX rewards every 28-day epoch, building on top of the one-time retroactive airdrop.

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

dYdX ( DYDX)

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