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.

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Derivative exchanges

dYdX

# dYdX Notional trading volume Methodology

## 1. Overview

Notional trading volume measures the total USD value of derivatives trading activity on the dYdX platform across all protocol versions. This metric captures perpetual futures trading volume from three distinct periods and technological implementations: legacy StarkEx-based dYdX V3 (pre-2023), current StarkEx-based dYdX V3 (post-2023), and the native dYdX dYdX V4 chain. The calculation combines blockchain event data, API feeds, and historical datasets to provide comprehensive trading volume measurement across dYdX's evolution.

## 2. Data sources

- **dYdX native chain events**: Blockchain message events from the dYdX dYdX V4 protocol containing `match` events with trading volume and fee data stored as JSON attributes
- **External API feeds**: dYdX candle data from API scrapers providing pre-calculated trading volume amounts for the StarkEx-based dYdX V3 protocol
- **Historical volume data**: Legacy gross merchandise value (GMV) data synchronized via Fivetran for pre-2023 periods
- **Transaction metadata**: Block timestamps, transaction hashes, and maker/taker subaccount identifiers from blockchain records

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: dYdX dYdX V4 native chain trading volume
- **Purpose**: Calculates daily trading volume from on-chain `match` events on the dYdX dYdX V4 protocol
- **Logic**: Filters blockchain message events for `match` event types, then parses JSON event attributes to extract maker and taker quote balance deltas and fee quantums. For each match event, calculates order volume as the minimum absolute value between `maker_quote_balance_delta_quote_quantums` and `taker_quote_balance_delta_quote_quantums`. Converts quantum values to USDC by dividing by 10^6 (6 decimal places). Groups by day and sums all order volumes to get daily totals.
- **Key fields**: `maker_subaccount`, `taker_subaccount`, `order_volume` (calculated), `block_timestamp`, `notional_trading_volume` (aggregated)

### Component B: dYdX dYdX V3 current period trading volume
- **Purpose**: Provides trading volume data for the StarkEx-based dYdX dYdX V3 protocol from 2023 onwards
- **Logic**: Reads pre-calculated trading volume data from external API candle feeds. Filters for timestamps after 2023-01-01 and directly uses the `volume_amount` field as the trading volume without additional transformations.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `volume_amount`, `market`, `base_token_volume`

### Component C: dYdX legacy trading volume
- **Purpose**: Provides historical trading volume for periods before 2023-01-01
- **Logic**: Uses historical GMV data synchronized through Fivetran from legacy dYdX systems. Filters for daily timestamps on or before 2023-01-01 and uses the `gmv` field as the trading volume.
- **Key fields**: `daily_timestamp`, `gmv`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All three components are combined using union operations with consistent metadata fields including chain identifier (starkex for dYdX V3, dydx for dYdX V4), market sector (derivatives), business segment (perpetual), and product version (dYdX V3 or dYdX V4)
- **Currency conversion**: Data is already in USD - dYdX V4 uses USDC quantums converted to USD equivalent, while API and legacy sources provide USD-denominated values
- **Time aggregation**: All data is aggregated to daily boundaries using timestamp truncation for blockchain data and pre-aggregated daily values for API/legacy sources  
- **Final calculation**: The metric represents the sum of all trading volume across all dYdX protocol versions and time periods, with temporal boundaries ensuring no double-counting between legacy (≤2023-01-01) and current (>2023-01-01) data sources

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

Total USD value of derivative contracts executed on the protocol.

dYdXDYDX

Notional trading volume

Notional trading volume

Competitive landscape

Chain breakdown