Market makers offer trades through order book & make money on bid-ask spreads (supply-side fees).

dYdX is a non-custodial trading and derivatives protocol initially built on Ethereum and later expanded to their own blcokchain built on top of the Cosmos SDK. dYdX was founded by Antonio Juliano and launched in 2017.

DYDX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. dYdX Trading Inc. currently takes all of the total trading fees paid by traders (revenue). dYdX’s investors include a16z, Polychain, The Spartan Group, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Derivative exchanges

dYdX

# dYdX Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

The dydx fees metric aggregates trading fees and transaction fees across all versions and chains of the dydx decentralized exchange protocol. This includes fees from dYdX V3 (StarkEx), legacy Ethereum operations, dydx chain transaction fees, and dYdX V4 trading fees. The metric answers the question: "What is the total daily fee revenue generated by the dydx protocol across all its iterations and deployment chains?" The calculation combines five distinct fee sources, each requiring different data processing approaches due to varying protocol architectures and data structures.

## 2. Data sources

- **dydx API fee data**: 24-hour rolling fee totals from the dydx dYdX V3 protocol scraper, captured on an hourly basis
- **Manual fee configuration**: Hardcoded daily fee amounts for January through March 2023 to fill gaps in API data coverage
- **Legacy Ethereum revenue data**: Historical fee and revenue data from pre-migration dydx operations on Ethereum, synchronized via Fivetran
- **dydx chain transaction records**: Native blockchain transaction data from the dydx application-specific blockchain, including transaction fees and tips
- **dydx dYdX V4 match events**: Trading fee data extracted from `match` event messages in the dydx dYdX V4 protocol, containing maker and taker fee information
- **CoinGecko end-of-day price feeds**: Price data for `dydx-chain` token to convert native token fees to USD

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Manual historical fees
- **Purpose**: Provides accurate fee data for January through March 2023 when API data was unreliable or unavailable
- **Logic**: Uses a hardcoded configuration of daily fee amounts for 65 specific dates from January 1, 2023 through March 6, 2023. The values are cast as bignumeric for precision and truncated to daily timestamps. These manual values serve as the authoritative source for this historical period
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily boundary), `fee_amount` (USD-denominated fees)

### Component B: API hourly trading fees  
- **Purpose**: Captures dYdX V3 protocol trading fees from the dydx API with data quality corrections
- **Logic**: Processes 24-hour rolling fee totals by taking hourly snapshots and selecting the value at 00:00, 01:00, or 02:00 UTC (using the first available). The previous day's fee total is extracted from these snapshots. Manual overrides from the hardcoded configuration are then applied to correct any faulty API values, with manual data taking precedence when both exist
- **Key fields**: `timestamp` (daily boundary), `fee_amount` (USD-denominated fees from API or manual override)

### Component C: Legacy ethereum revenues
- **Purpose**: Includes historical fee data from dydx operations on Ethereum before migration to other chains
- **Logic**: Pulls historical revenue data through a Fivetran synchronization process, filtering specifically for Ethereum chain data. The data is already processed and aggregated at daily intervals
- **Key fields**: `daily_timestamp` (daily boundary), `fees` (USD-denominated revenue), `chain` (filtered to 'ethereum')

### Component D: dydx chain transaction fees
- **Purpose**: Captures transaction fees paid on the dydx application-specific blockchain
- **Logic**: Aggregates daily transaction fees from dydx chain transaction records, combining both base transaction fees and tip amounts. Failed transactions (with null fees) are excluded. The raw fee amounts are divided by 10^18 to adjust for token decimals, then converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds for the `dydx-chain` token
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp`, `transaction_fee` (base fee), `transaction_tip`, combined into total fees and converted to USD

### Component E: dYdX V4 trading fees
- **Purpose**: Captures maker and taker fees from dYdX V4 protocol trading activity
- **Logic**: Extracts fee data from `match` event messages in the dydx dYdX V4 protocol. Both `taker_order_fee_quote_quantums` and `maker_order_fee_quote_quantums` are pulled from event attributes, cast as numeric values, and summed together. Since these quantums are USDC-denominated, they are divided by 10^6 to convert to standard USDC amounts (which are USD-equivalent)
- **Key fields**: `taker_order_fee_raw` and `maker_order_fee_raw` (extracted from event attributes), `block_timestamp` for daily aggregation

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All five components are combined using UNION ALL operations, with each source mapped to a consistent schema including `timestamp`, `chain_id`, `product_id`, `version`, and `fees` fields. Chain identifiers distinguish between 'starkex' (dYdX V3), 'dydx' (chain and dYdX V4), and version labels ('dYdX V3', 'v1', 'dYdX V4', 'dYdX Chain')
- **Currency conversion**: Legacy Ethereum and manual fees are already in USD. dydx chain fees are converted using end-of-day CoinGecko prices. dYdX V4 fees are inherently USD-equivalent as USDC. API fees are assumed to be USD-denominated
- **Time aggregation**: All timestamps are truncated to daily boundaries using `timestamp_trunc(timestamp, day)` to ensure consistent daily aggregation across all sources
- **Final calculation**: The `finalize_metric_fees` macro processes the combined data with a 'fill_zeros' strategy to ensure no gaps in the time series, validates schema consistency, and applies chain availability filters. The result is a complete daily time series of total dydx protocol fee revenue across all versions and chains

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

dYdXDYDX

Fees

Fees

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown