DeFi Currency - dYdX

dYdX is a leading decentralized exchange that currently supports perpetual, margin trading, and spot trading, as well as lending, and borrowing. dYdX runs on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and allows users to trade with no intermediaries.

After the public launch of Layer 2, our Layer 1 Perpetuals product will continue to run in parallel with Layer 2. After a few weeks, Layer 1 Perpetuals will be wound down, and users will need to close their positions on Layer 1 and then open new positions on Layer 2.

What is Layer 2?

To significantly scale trading, dYdX and StarkWare have built a Layer 2 protocol for cross-margined perpetuals, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s Perpetual smart contracts. Traders can expect significantly lower gas costs, and in turn, much lower trading fees and minimum trade sizes.

StarkWare zkSTARKS technology is a form of ZK-Rollup technology that significantly increases dYdX’s trade settlement capacity, while still basing its security on the underlying Ethereum blockchain. StarkWare’s dYdX integration combines STARK proofs for data integrity with on-chain data availability to ensure a fully non-custodial protocol. Trades are settled on a Layer 2 system, which publishes zero-knowledge proofs periodically to an Ethereum smart contract in order to prove that state transitions within Layer 2 are valid.

Why choose StarkWare to build a Layer 2 solution?

In order to address immediate scaling issues, dYdX's engineering team did extensive due diligence on various Layer 2 solutions and other Layer 1s.

Overall, StarkWare was able to provide by far the best trading experience for our users in the shortest amount of time. Other Layer 1s do not yet have the collateral base and building blocks such as wallets and developer tools that have made Ethereum successful. While other Layer 2 solutions, such as optimistic rollups, are potentially promising, they are not as battle tested, don’t offer quite the same product experience (very long withdrawal times), and cannot offer the same level of decentralization & cryptographic guarantees as ZK-Rollups.

Ultimately, we wanted a solution that could be live on mainnet within months, rather than an undefined period of time. StarkWare has already been running spot-trading exchanges in production, and has a stellar reputation in the industry around security and expertise.

We are building an open platform for advanced cryptofinancial products, powered by the Ethereum blockchain.

Empowering traders, worldwide.
Few have access to advanced tools & products in the existing financial system. We believe in empowering more traders, in more places, with powerful, transparent, and fair financial products.