Community Spotlight: dYdX To Become a Fully Decentralized Protocol in v4

Commonwealth Team -

Commonwealth is excited to spotlight dYdX, one of our top communities. As a platform that has grown to over a billion dollars a day in trading volume, we’re excited to see dYdX continue to use our platform as they work towards becoming fully decentralized.

dYdX: An Open Protocol for Decentralized Derivatives Built on the Ethereum Blockchain

dYdX set out with the mission to build the world’s leading crypto trading platform. They’ve grown to become the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume, even challenging major centralized exchanges for market share in 2021. dYdX’s core exchange protocol is built on STARK rollups and Ethereum smart contracts—a structure that ensures all funds and positions on dYdX have full transparency and self-custody.

Decentralization lies at the heart of dYdX’s mission: they believe it will improve transparency, safety, fairness, and equality of opportunity. This is also why all of dYdX’s governance and staking are built on smart contracts without central administrator capabilities, allowing them to be open source and audited by third parties.

dYdX will become fully decentralized by the end of 2022. Their orderbook and matching engine currently run centrally, a system that has allowed the protocol to grow into the most liquid exchange in all of crypto and scale tens of millions of orders placed per day with sub-second latency. Once dYdX is decentralized, these aspects of the protocol will be controlled by the community.

To learn more about dYdX, visit their website or check them out on Twitter, Medium, and Discord.

Commonwealth: An All-In-One Platform for Decentralized Communities

Commonwealth accommodates various governance processes, making it so projects don’t need to be managed across multiple communities like Discord, Telegram, or other governance platforms. With our platform, projects can host their decentralized governance, community discussions, treasury management, and more all in one place. Since its inception, Commonwealth has become the governance tool and crypto-native community used by many of the top DeFi projects to discuss, vote on, and fund their initiatives.

Since dYdX joined Commonwealth, the organization’s community operations have been fundamentally improved. They have more functionality on a streamlined system, making their governance process seamless. Everything from discussions to crowdfunding to executing proposals happens in one place—on Commonwealth.

Participate in dYdX’s Commonwealth Forum

dYdX’s platform on Commonwealth was built custom for their ecosystem and includes the following capabilities:

  • Crypto-Native Token Forum: The dYdX community on Commonwealth comes with full forum capabilities including threaded discussions, upvotes, user profiles, and more.
  • On-Chain Governance: The dYdX community can discuss, vote on, and execute governance proposals all on-chain and with complete transparency through their custom Commonwealth forum.

The dYdX Commonwealth forum is now live and actively used by the dYdX community: it’s where they launched their grants program, designed to empower community contributors and serve as a launchpad for more formalized governance processes. With Commonwealth’s forum, they gathered feedback from the community on the program’s initial budget, support team, and more. Users are encouraged to participate in the ongoing discussions on their new platform.

Recent discussions and proposals include:

  • A discussion about the dYdX Ambassador Program: how to recruit candidates, what rewards to offer, how to structure rewards and compensation, when the launch date will be, how to retain candidates, how to motivate active participation, and more.
  • A thread for proposed Endorsed Delegates to post their profile and pitch, discussing why they want to be an Endorsed Delegate, why they should be chosen, how they will connect with and contribute to the dYdX community and governance, and more.
  • A discussion about the structure of the dYdX trader rewards mechanism and how it incentivizes higher end-of-epoch volume. Xenophon Labs applied for a dYdX grant to learn more about this mechanism in order to understand how traders can “game” the current mechanism and how dYdX can make modifications so it’s fairer and promotes long-term protocol growth. They shared their findings and recommendations in the Commonwealth forum.


The live forum can be found at https://commonwealth.im/dydx