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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dYdX

# dYdX P/F ratio (circulating) Methodology

## 1. Overview

The dYdX Price-to-Fees (P/F) circulating ratio measures the relationship between the protocol's market valuation and its fee-generating capacity. This metric is calculated by dividing the circulating market capitalization by annualized fees, providing insight into how the market values each dollar of annual fee generation. The calculation accounts for dYdX's evolution from an Ethereum-based protocol to StarkEx deployment and finally to its own blockchain, combining multiple fee sources across different protocol versions and chains.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on several key data sources:

- **Market capitalization data**: End-of-day circulating market cap data from CoinGecko's daily market data API, tracking both the original DYDX token and the dYdX Chain token
- **Trading fee data**: API-scraped hourly trading fee data from dYdX's internal systems capturing perpetual trading activity
- **Blockchain transaction data**: Native dYdX Chain transaction records including transaction fees and tips paid by users
- **Match event data**: Parsed `match` events from dYdX Chain message events containing maker and taker fee information from dYdX V4 trading
- **Manual fee records**: Team-provided historical fee data for early 2023 periods where other data sources were incomplete
- **Legacy revenue data**: Historical revenue tracking data from the Ethereum-based protocol via third-party data pipelines
- **Token price feeds**: End-of-day price data for DYDX token conversion to USD values

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Market cap circulating calculation
- **Purpose**: Establishes the circulating market capitalization denominator for the P/F ratio
- **Logic**: Extracts daily circulating market cap values from CoinGecko's market data, handling the protocol's token transition. For dates before January 15, 2024, uses the 'dydx' token market cap. For January 15, 2024 and later, uses the 'dydx-chain' token market cap. This transition reflects the protocol's migration from Ethereum-based operations to its own blockchain
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp as `timestamp`, circulating market cap in USD as `market_cap_circulating`

### Component B: Fee source aggregation  
- **Purpose**: Combines all fee-generating activities across different protocol versions and deployment environments
- **Logic**: Aggregates fees from multiple sources with prioritization for data quality. Manual historical fees take precedence over API data where both exist. The aggregation includes five distinct sources: manual team-provided fees for early 2023, API-scraped trading fees from dYdX V3 operations, legacy revenue data from Ethereum deployment, native blockchain transaction fees from dYdX Chain, and dYdX V4 trading match fees from the latest protocol version
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp as `timestamp`, total fee amount in USD as `fees`, chain identifier as `chain_id`, protocol version as `product_id`

### Component C: Manual historical fees
- **Purpose**: Provides accurate fee data for the early operational period when other tracking systems were incomplete
- **Logic**: Uses a hardcoded configuration of daily fee amounts from January 1 through March 6, 2023, as provided by the dYdX team. These values represent trading fees that were manually calculated and verified by the protocol team during the early operational period
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp as `timestamp`, manually verified fee amount as `fee_amount`

### Component D: API trading fees processing
- **Purpose**: Converts hourly trading fee snapshots into daily fee amounts for dYdX V3 protocol operations
- **Logic**: Processes hourly trading fee data by taking daily snapshots at consistent UTC hours. For each day, selects the fee amount recorded at 00:00, 01:00, or 02:00 UTC (in that priority order) and attributes it to the previous day since fees represent 24-hour rolling totals. Manual fee overrides are applied where team-provided corrections exist for specific dates
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp as `timestamp`, snapshot fee amount as `fee_amount`

### Component E: dYdX Chain transaction fees
- **Purpose**: Captures native blockchain fees paid for transaction processing on dYdX Chain
- **Logic**: Aggregates transaction fees and tips from all dYdX Chain transactions, excluding failed transactions (those with null or zero fees). Converts native DYDX token fees to USD using end-of-day price feeds from CoinGecko. Applies 18-decimal adjustment for proper token unit conversion
- **Key fields**: Block timestamp as `block_timestamp`, transaction fee plus tip as `transaction_fee`

### Component F: dYdX V4 trading match fees
- **Purpose**: Captures maker and taker fees from dYdX V4 protocol trading matches on dYdX Chain
- **Logic**: Processes `match` events from dYdX Chain message events, extracting maker and taker fee amounts from event attributes. Fees are denominated in USDC quote quantums and converted to USD by dividing by 10^6 (6-decimal adjustment). Combines maker and taker fees for total trading fee per match
- **Key fields**: Block timestamp as `block_timestamp`, maker fee as `maker_order_fee_raw`, taker fee as `taker_order_fee_raw`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: All fee sources are unioned together with consistent daily timestamp and USD denomination. Fee data is tagged by chain (StarkEx vs dYdX Chain) and protocol version (dYdX V3, dYdX V4, dYdX Chain) for proper categorization
- **Currency conversion**: Native DYDX chain fees converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds. USDC-denominated dYdX V4 fees treated as 1:1 USD equivalent after decimal adjustment
- **Time aggregation**: All data aggregated to daily grain with consistent UTC day boundaries. Hourly trading fee snapshots converted to daily attribution
- **Final calculation**: The P/F ratio is calculated by dividing the circulating market cap by annualized fees (fees multiplied by 365). Missing days are filled with zero values using the fill-zero strategy to maintain continuous time series

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

${market_cap_circulating} / (rolling_avg(${fees}, 30) * 365)

Circulating market cap relative to annualized fees.

dYdXDYDX

P/F ratio (circulating)

P/F ratio (circulating)

Competitive landscape