Funded grants

This grant will support development and management of the dYdX VIP Affiliate program, an addition to the in-protocol affiliate system for attracting larger KOLs and institutional partners. The program will allow qualified VIP affiliates to earn up to 50% of referred user taker fees, with a maximum of $10,000 per referral per 30-day rolling period. The increased referral fee is expected to attract industry-leading affiliates, including institutional partners and influential KOLs. This should result in a substantial increase in daily active users, trading volume, and dYdX marketing growth.

This proposal seeks approval for a combination of podcast sponsorship and a 7-Day Media Blitz on Bankless to maximize the visibility and awareness of the upcoming launch of dYdX Unlimited. The sponsorship and media blitz will allow us to reach a highly targeted and engaged audience of crypto traders, DeFi enthusiasts, and early adopters, ensuring a high-impact launch for dYdX Unlimited.

This grant funds a freelance video producer to create educational and promotional content for dYdX over a six-month period. The project aims to produce in-depth tutorials and short-form promotional clips to educate users on dYdX platform features, promote dYdX Unlimited, and serve as resources for onboarding new users.

Chaos Labs has led both the original 6 month launch incentives program and the 3 month launch incentives renewal program. The two programs have been successful in helping to bootstrap the dYdX chain and ensure trader retention, with a weekly trader retention rate ranging from 50-80% during this time.

This grant serves to integrate KYVE’s permanent, decentralized data storage and accessibility solutions into the dYdX ecosystem for an initial 6 months. By doing so, it will eliminate the need for costly archival nodes and mitigate the risks of data loss or accessibility issues.

This grant will fund the appointment of Gauntlet as the operator responsible for ensuring the success of the upcoming Megavault product launch.

This grant will fund the distribution of promotional content by the Revelo Intel platform, including an up-to-date in-depth breakdown of the dYdX v4 protocol and eight installments of a newsletter campaign, with the goal of attracting more participants to the protocol.

This grant will support the launch of a dYdX affiliate program following protocol development to add support for fee redistribution to affiliates, which is set to launch with dYdX Unlimited. The scope of work involves building out the necessary frontend integration and data engineering to support affiliates.

Fracton Ventures is hosting DAO TOKYO 2024, a two-day community-driven event in Tokyo. The event will feature talks, workshops, and networking opportunities to connect 1,000+ developers, students, entrepreneurs, and investors. This event will position dYdX as a leader among top DAOs and increase recognition in the region.

Jihoon Yi is experienced in Web3 community management and business development. Jihoon natively speaks Korean and has full professional fluency in English and Japanese. The Korean speaking community manager will oversee growth in the region, facilitating two dYdX Korean Telegram channels, developing unique content, organizing monthly community calls with KOLs from Korean trading communities, analyze and report on key topics, and provide concise reporting to the dYdX Ecosystem Development Program.

This grant funds Silk Nodes to continue support for their validator tools discord bot and web tooling suite. Validator Tools is a comprehensive suite of products and services including validator alerts, chain snapshots, node setup and upgrade guides, governance proposal alerts, and more. Validators can join the dYdX discord (or add the bot to their own server) to receive custom alerts on their own uptime status, ensuring that they are immediately alerted in the event that their node goes down. The tool also informs validators of impending upgrades, minimizing chain downtime during an upgrade.

This grant will fund the deployment and ongoing maintenance of a custom ‘Gateway’ node, with the goal of improving order execution for more sophisticated traders.

This grant will fund the deployment and ongoing maintenance of a custom ‘Connectivity’ node, with the goal of supporting advanced bandwidth and network connectivity on the dYdX chain. After launching the latest major upgrade, dYdX has seen a degradation in network performance and block production speeds (currently at 1.1 seconds, it used to be under 1 second). Our goal is to improve this connectivity issue by introducing an additional networking layer that improves gossiping and consensus across the majority of validators. The node will run specialized software meant exclusively for relaying messaging and improve the propagation of orders among validators. Validators will peer persistently with this node, guaranteeing that they always receive and send the latest chain updates.

This grant will fund the integration and ongoing support of the dYdX v4 chain on Bitget, a leading centralized exchange with growing volumes and users. The support will include dYdX Chain deposits, withdrawals, trading, and staking. Bitget have partnered with Kiln, an active validator on the dYdX Chain, to offer their users in-exchange staking capabilities.

This grant will fund the development of a Rust trading client API for dYdX V4, which will have full feature parity with all the existing trading clients (Python and Typescript). The grant also includes six months of support and maintenance, inclusive of minor improvements and bug fixes, but not inclusive of significant functional updates.

This grant will fund a full penetration test of the dYdX frontend and indexer codebases, neither of which were formally audited as part of the dYdX v4 launch. Halborn will run a deep dive on both codebases in an effort to find and disclose any vulnerabilities with these critical pieces of dYdX infrastructure. A report will be shared with the DEP, the DOS, and the dYdX Trading team with recommendations on how to patch any vulnerabilities identified through this exercise.

The PnL modal will display the following data: market, PnL %, entry price, oracle, leverage, as well as a QR code that links to the dYdX frontend.

We're funding RHINO, Kingnodes, Lavender.Five, and Polkachu to manage a cluster of dedicated Base nodes to allow dYdX to access price feeds on Base.

This grant will fund the renewal of our MEV Committee, launched in December 2023 to help combat malicious activity among the validator set

This grant will fund the integration of Phantom wallet on the dYdX Exchange frontend. Phantom is the leading Solana wallet, offering users an experience similar to Metamask and Keplr. Upon completion of the integration, the Phantom wallet will offer feature parity with other dYdX supported wallets in terms of user onboarding and trading. Traders will be able to connect their wallet, deposit/withdraw, trade, claim rewards, and stake via the frontend.

This grant will fund the development of a dYdX-specific cosmwasm smart contract to support Elixir market making vaults. Elixir vaults allow users to deposit capital and earn yield from their native delta neutral market making strategy, which in turn improves the liquidity and overall trading volume of the underlying dYdX markets. Since their vaults are proactively trading and quoting to maintain their strategies, we expect dYdX volumes and orderbook liquidity to grow as users deposit more capital.

This grant will fund the development and open sourcing of a market maker script for dYdX traders to easily deploy their own strategy. Through this codebase, API-based traders and developers interested in deploying more sophisticated trading strategies can do so much more easily by leveraging standard functions and pre-built modules.

This grant will fund the continued support of the dYdX Observatory Hub and migration of our existing MEV dashboard from its standalone web application (run by Skip) to Observatory (run by RockawayX). By migrating the dashboard to Observatory, we get the benefit of full-time support by the Rockaway team and additional functionality leveraging the existing in-depth validator data already supported by their platform. Our goal is to provide a more comprehensive overview of all validator activity, including their MEV scores coupled with geographic distribution, technical data, and participation. Overall, we think the community benefits from a single point of reference for all validator-related data.

Rage Trade is a multi-chain perp aggregator which offers aggregated liquidity, best routing, and enhanced bridging across multiple chains and markets. The team has successfully integrated multiple perp trading venues, attracting hundreds of millions in volumes to exchanges through their unique aggregated trading experience.

This month concludes our designated market maker for long-tail markets on dYdX. As a reminder, we partnered with both RavenDAO and Velar Technologies to improve the liquidity and spread on longer tail, illiquid markets. In doing so, we allow traders to execute better trades across more markets, and improve the overall health of the protocol by minimizing volatility and illiquid market manipulation.

The community has voted to extend the existing launch incentives program managed by Chaos Labs for an additional three months (which is equal to two seasons). The community will allocate another $10M DYDX from the community treasury for rewarding traders and active users of the protocol.

This grant funds a full integration with Keplr wallet on the dYdX trading application, as well as a retroactive grant for Keplr’s existing dYdX integration. Upon completion of the scope of work covered by this grant, the Keplr integration will have full feature parity with other wallet integrations on the dYdX exchange (plus the existing staking and governance functionality), with the exception of signature-less trading, which may be implemented later on.

This grant will fund the development of an Urbit client for dYdX with one-click install functionality. The Urbit client will have full feature parity with the dYdX v4 trading site.

This grant will fund Helius to manage two additional dedicated Solana RPC nodes that will allow dYdX testnet validators to access Slinky's Solana price feeds. The location of the nodes will be evenly split between Tokyo and Amsterdam.

dYdX Merch is a long successful program that enables the community to embrace dYdX in their daily lives beyond online and trading circles. Merch provides giveaways and freebies for top trading events and encourages the community to create content and generate word-of-mouth. The six month renewal will sustain these activities and allow for new product development as well as operational refinement.

This grant will fund the development of an open-source copy trading bot for dYdX users to engage in different trading strategies that mirror those of popular, active, and/or profitable dYdX addresses. The bot will screen for active traders, their strategies, their profitability, and overall market participation, which will then be presented to users for opportunities to programmatically copy any trades being placed.

This grant funded Nabla to 1) create an “exportˮ function on the history subpage of the portfolio page, and 2) restyle the markets page on the dYdX frontend.

On Ethereum, telegram trading bots account for 5% of all trading activity from front-ends. On dYdX chain, this market is (as yet) relatively unexplored. Integrating with more telegram bot interfaces could open dYdX’s to an untapped audience and significantly increase trading activity.

As dYdX Chain adoption continues to grow, with more exchanges listing the chain through the support of grants, there is now a need for improved liquidity of the underlying token across these exchanges. This initiative will allow a professional market maker to increase exchange deposits and improve liquidity, which will enable withdrawals and improve the overall trading experience for users looking to transact with DYDX.

This grant will fund Helius to manage four dedicated Solana RPC nodes for Slinky, which will allow dYdX to add Solana price feeds. The location of the nodes will be evenly split between Tokyo and Amsterdam.

As part of the move from dYdX's in-protocol oracle mechanism to Slinky (Skip's high-performance oracle solution) this grant will fund four RPC providers to manage a cluster of dedicated Solana RPC nodes that will allow dYdX to access Solana price feeds.

This grant will fund the deployment of capital for testing and analysis of the new LP Vaults functionality launching on dYdX. LP Vaults will allow users to deposit capital for liquidity provisioning on long-tail markets using delta-neutral market making strategies. These vaults may allow users to profit in the long run, and will hopefully contribute towards significantly more liquidity on long-tail markets of dYdX.

This grant will fund the integration, license ownership, and maintenance of Skip’s Slinky sidecar software that will be used to support a new price oracle mechanism and a permissionless market listing system for dYdX.

This grant serves to transfer the dYdX Ops SubDAO's existing node provider service agreements to the DEP to further decentralize the dYdX chain infrastructure stack. The three providers will run the following services as part of the arrangement: five (5) full nodes, two (2) archival nodes, one (1) database download location, one (1) StateSync snapshots location, and one (1) seed node.

Espacio Cripto is a leading crypto community covering Latin America, focused on high-quality content, decentralization, and simplicity. Their growth is marked by a strong social media presence, newsletter, and 256 podcast episodes, accumulating over 300 hours of content and surpassing 115,000 downloads. Additionally, their research arm has collaborated with notable organizations like the Optimism Collective and Arbitrum DAO. This partnership will bolster dYdX in LATAM and position dydx.exchange as the top choice in the region. Espacio Cripto will conduct in depth research and provide reporting on key attribution drivers to the exchange with an emphasis on WAU, fees, and volume.

This grant will fund the development of a Python trading client for dYdX V4, which will have full feature parity with the existing TypeScript client.

This grant will support the integration of dYdX v4 on Binance, the leading centralized exchange for all trading activity in crypto. Integrating dYdX v4 includes adding support for deposits, withdrawals, and trading the v4 DYDX token.

This grant will fund the assessment of all new market proposals submitted on dYdX v4. Chaos Labs will independently review all available parameters for the market, including oracles used and liquidity tiers, and put forward recommendations for changes to the proposal as needed. If a proposal is submitted without a forum post, Chaos will create a new thread to share their own thoughts and assessment of the market proposal. All assessments will be done within 24h of the proposal going live or submitted on the forums.

BeInCrypto is a global crypto media outlet spanning 14 languages and over 7 million unique users monthly across channels. The campaign will include a multi-channel strategy aiming to raise awareness of dYdX among the BeInCrypto audience and increase the visibility of key messaging, such as: USDC Staking Rewards, dYdX Chain Trading, dYdX Chain Features, and the broader dYdX Ecosystem. 

The dYdX ecosystem boasts multiple international community managers who help develop and nurture communities in their respective regions. Jihoon Yi is experienced in Web3 community management and business development. Jihoon natively speaks Korean and has full professional fluency in English and Japanese. The Korean speaking community manager will oversee growth in the region, facilitating two dYdX Korean Telegram channels, developing unique content, organizing monthly community calls with KOLs from Korean trading communities, analyze and report on key topics, and provide concise reporting to the dYdX Ecosystem Development Program.

Crypto-Insiders is the largest Dutch-Speaking crypto news and media outlet in the Netherlands by market share. This grant funds a 6 month marketing and media partnership for dYdX in the Netherlands and other Dutch-speaking communities with the following deliverables:

Blockaid provides real-time malicious app detection and web scraping services for blockchain protocols. Thanks to partnerships with wallet providers like Metamask, they can block interactions with malicious websites instantly, and warn of / prevent malicious transactions from being signed by the end user. The dYdX Ecosystem Development Program proposes to enter into a one-year service agreement with Blockaid by which Blockaid will extend these monitoring and signature prevention services to malicious dYdX copycat websites.

This grant fills the circulating supply, Fees, Rewards, and APR request for proposals document put out by the DEP in February. The grant funds creation and maintenance of API endpoints that expose values for circulating supply, staking APR, trading fee collection, gas fee collection, and trading rewards distribution. The grant also includes the creation and maintenance of thorough documentation on the APIs for developers, including endpoint specifications, authentication procedures, formulas, and sample requests. A dashboard will also be created that returns these values such that they are easily accessible by anyone in the community. The endpoints will be maintained for a period of no less than 1 year.

This grant funds Range to add support for the dYdX Chain in Range’s suite of security and risk infrastructure tools. The integration is composed of three core deliverables, each of which represents an integration with a separate component of Range’s product suite:

RavenDAO will provide market making services on dYdX v4 long-tail assets through an ongoing monthly agreement with the DEP. The goal for these services is to improve top of book liquidity and spreads for the supported markets.The DEP will provide an initial list of markets to be supported. In addition to these markets, RavenDAO will be asked to support new markets listed through governance. The DEP will inform RavenDAO four days in advance of the market being listed. RavenDAO will be expected to add liquidity within twelve (12) hours of the market being listed on dYdX.

HackOxford, part of ethOxford is a 3 day hackathon hosted at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. EthOxford brings together hackers from Istanbul, London, Tokyo, Paris, Lisbon, and more, creating a vibrant culmination of some of the greatest minds in crypto. dYdX will be represented among other protocols and positioned as a leading appchain on Cosmos– ready for engagement from builders and traders alike!

Odaily is one of the largest blockchain media firms serving the Chinese speaking market throughout China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Odaily boasts 1.5m unique visits per month across multiple platforms. This grant will bring extensive knowledge of dYdX to the Chinese speaking market, enabling user growth and positioning dYdX as the go-to platform to be used by traders in Asia. The DEP reserves the right to adjust the contract at any time or under certain conditions exit the marketing agreement. Engagement will be tracked by the dYdX team via custom link. 

WuBlockchain is one of the top blockchain media outlets serving the Chinese speaking market. WuBlockchain boasts a multichannel readership of over 1 million, bringing global industry news into the hands of crypto enthusiasts. The grant will help make dYdX a household name in Chinese speaking markets, providing traders with advanced knowledge and key insights.The DEP reserves the right to adjust the contract at any time or under certain conditions exit the marketing agreement. Engagement will be tracked by the dYdX team via custom link. 

This grant will fund the integration of dYdX v4 on Kucoin Exchange, a leading centralized exchange. Integrating dYdX v4 includes adding support for deposits, withdrawals, and native staking within the exchange for the v4 DYDX token. Users will be able to trade and stake their token through Kucoin. The fee covers the technical costs for integration, and incentivizes the exchange to support in a timely manner (by end of Q1).

Hummingbot is the leading open source framework for market making and arbitrage bots. dYdX has shown to be one of the most active DEX’s for Hummingbot users, bringing significant volume to the dYdX exchange. This grant will enable Hummingbot to establish a new connector for dYdX v4 compatibility, integrating directly into the WebSocket API. The grant also covers maintenance for the connector as well as content creation, providing users with the necessary information to run strategies on dYdX. Hummingbot will promote and maintain the connector for 12 months after release.

This grant sponsors BTC-Echo, the largest German media company by market share, to conduct a comprehensive content and community engagement campaign in the German market. The campaign will aim to direct traders from the German markets to engage with the v4 trading platform by focusing on trading and launch incentives, v4 protocol architecture, and educational content aimed at simplifying the process of onboarding capital to the chain.

This is a grant to the Kiln Validator team for supporting the dYdX chain in their Cosmos Validator Watcher plugin. The Validator Watcher operates as a Prometheus exporter and brings real-time monitoring of any Cosmos-based blockchains. Using this tool, validators can access features like:‍

This grant will fund support for a Coinbase IBC forwarding integration that will allow users to transfer directly between Coinbase accounts and dYdX accounts. Instead of first withdrawing funds to Noble and then depositing to dYdX, Coinbase users will be able to select dYdX as a destination chain and directly credit their dYdX Chain accounts.

In Japan, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the country’s leading regulatory body for all crypto related matters, is responsible for approving the listing of new tokens across all exchanges. Exchanges must first get approval from the FSA before they can add new markets. This can be a long and difficult process. This grant will fund an effort to gain whitelisting approval from the FSA for all exchanges in Japan to be permitted to list DYDX. As part of the grant, CoinTrade, the exchange leading the listing process, will also add support for DYDX trading and transfers on their exchange. We expect more to follow in response given the painful regulatory process will be done.

This grant will support the existing Tradingview connector tool, a previous grants funded project that was well received and used by the community, to be compatible with dYdX v4. The tool allows users to connect their dYdX accounts and execute on Tradingview strategies. This grant will allow for advanced and automated trading strategy implementation and support every order type offered on v4.

This grant will fund the integration of the DYDX token and the development of a dedicated staking page on StakingRewards.com. The project aims to boost staking adoption, establish StakingRewards.com as a definitive resource for dYdX staking information, and enhance the visibility of dYdX in the staking community.

This grant will fund PANews to create and publish in-depth articles in Chinese, focusing on the dYdX v4 platform, its migration process, staking mechanisms, and the trading incentives program administered by Chaos Labs. As part of this process, PANews will ensure that the articles are distributed throughout its deep network of local discord / telegram communities, as well as feature the articles on coingecko and Coinmarketcap.

This is a grant to the Silk Nodes Validator team to build and maintain their Validator Tools alerting system and discord bot for dYdX. Validator Tools is a comprehensive suite of products and services aimed at improving the quality of life for validators and users of the v4 chain. These tools include validator alerts, chain snapshots, node setup and upgrade guides, governance proposal alerts, and more. Validators can join the dYdX discord (or add the bot to their own server) to receive custom alerts on their own uptime status, ensuring that they are immediately alerted in the event that their node goes down. The tool also informs validators of impending upgrades, minimizing chain downtime during an upgrade. Approximately 33% of dYdX validators have enabled alerts already. The grant is inclusive of a retroactive grant for setup, testing, and initial maintenance of the bot in the dYdX discord during the month of October, as well as a recurring grant for 5 months of forward-looking maintenance through the end of March, 2024.

This grant will fund the support for dYdX v4 on Forest, an enterprise-grade wallet suite for crypto professionals that need additional security and functionality to their wallet. Forest provides a comprehensive custody solution comparable with those that investors have come to expect on Ethereum.

This grant will fund a group of contributors to participate in MEV mitigation efforts through a social slashing committee. In response to MEV concerns on v4, Reverie shared a proposal to launch a committee responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on MEV activity across active validators. The proposal received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community, and pass the on-chain vote. The committee will consist of seven members responsible for: regular meetings to discuss and analyze MEV activity, submitting recommendations for retroactive responses as needed, sharing finding with the community, developing a framework for future responses to MEV.

This grant will fund the development and support of a C++ client designed for trading on dYdX v4. The team has finished building a proprietary client in C++ for programmatic trading on. Through this grant, the team will redesign their code to make it more accessible for everyday traders, and ultimately open source the client for public use. $25,000 will be paid out for the development and open-sourcing of the client, and the remaining $5,000 will be paid to support the codebase for an additional six months. We expect changes to be needed and issues to appear in that period.

This grant will fund the ongoing support of advanced dYdX functionality on the Mintscan explorer. Funding is split between a $100,000 retroactive payment rewarding Cosmostation for the work already completed and $240,000 for ongoing maintenance and additional feature support in the next twelve months. The retroactive payment includes six months of testnet support and building advanced features specific to dYdX including subaccounts, proposed operations, and clob pairs. Monthly payments will cover the costs of all the technical requirements and manpower needed to support the explorer along with any minor ad-hoc requests made by Trading, Foundation, or the community. Ongoing support includes running RPCs, a custom indexer, a replicated database, and monitoring tools, all of which will depend on Cosmostation manpower to maintain efficiently for the explorer to run smoothly. This includes both mainnet and testnet explorer support.

This grant will fund support for the dYdX Chain and DYDX tokens on the Keplr multisig wallet. Funding will cover prior work done to build the multisig ($10k) and ongoing support for maintaining dYdX on the wallet ($10k). The wallet is ready to be released and will be maintained for 12 months with 99.9% uptime and a commitment to support dYdX users.

The Considered Finance team has an exceptional history in providing transparency reports on the dYdX DAO each epoch. They are a repeat grantee that has consistently provided valuable transparency data to the dYdX community. As such, we will seek to provide funding for 6 of these reports beginning with epoch 27 and ending with epoch 32 (Feb 2024). These reports will contain full financial statements, runway analysis, trading volumes vs major drivers (volatility and rewards), and other major exchange metrics. The principle is to clearly dashboard the current state of finances as well as provide the data to evaluate financial decisions on a retrospective basis. Here is an example of the most recent report: https://dydx.forum/t/state-of-dydx-finances-epoch-26/1113

Over the last six months, the dYdX merch program has been highly successful at engaging contributors, promoting dYdX at events, and rewarding community members. As such, we’ll be renewing the merch program for another six months. This is inclusive of a retroactive grant of compensation for the month of October, during which the Toyoji team continued to run the merch program without pay. This new iteration of the merch program will seek to increase community involvement in the merchandise selection process. New items of merchandise will be voted upon by the community before being released.

dYdX’s transition to the Cosmos stack with the v4 chain will be accompanied by a number of significant changes in the protocol’s infrastructure. There’s currently an education gap in what these changes will entail, as most dYdX users are unfamiliar with the Cosmos SDK. This education gap is particularly prevalent in countries in Asia, which include some of dYdX’s largest markets. This grant aims to decrease that education gap amongst dYdX users by funding the Four Pillars Research team to prepare a comprehensive research report on the dYdX v4 chain. The report will cover the infrastructure changes that will accompany the shift to the Cosmos SDK including the new order-matching engine, validator infrastructure, and more. The report will be published in both English and Korean, and will be made available for free to the public on Four Pillars’ website at https://4pillars.io/en

This grant funds the Skip team's ongoing work for the dYdX MEV dashboard, to monitor and analyze "Sovereign MEV" within the dYdX ecosystem. Created in collaboration with the dYdX research team, this dashboard will measure MEV through its proxy metric - "orderbook discrepancy". The underlying goal is to combat the negative aspects of MEV, such as atomic sandwich attacks, and to promote the benefits from benign MEV instances like arbitrage. Find more details about the dashboard’s purpose and utility here - https://dydx.exchange/blog/update-on-mev.

This grant will fund the deployment and support of a dYdX Chain instance on the Observatory dashboard. Observatory is used to monitor the health of Cosmos protocols and their validator sets. Given dYdX’s migration to Cosmos, there are a few concerns regarding validators specifically, including: Will dYdX include U.S. based validators? Will validators converge in Japan to minimize latency with other exchanges and internal servers? Will validators use the same ISPs? Will validators deploying outside of the co-location region (e.g. Japan) be at a significant disadvantage? This dashboard will help the community answer these questions with in-depth data on both the chain and validator set. The grant will fund 12 month support for nodes, maintenance, and ongoing testing to ensure accurate and relevant data is presented.

This grant will fund the development and support of data indexing services for dYdX v4, and the deployment of a dYdX v4 analytics dashboard with custom queries. Numia is the leading data service provider for Cosmos chains, supporting in-depth querying capacities of protocol data. Through this grant, dYdX will get access to CheckTx (the stage before confirmation) indexing, offering more granular analysis of orders processed on dYdX. Simultaneously, the Numia team will be deploying an instance of their Lenses analytics tools for dYdX. The dashboard will deploy custom queries to their portal, with access to data like Trading activity, Rewards and Fees, Treasury activity, and more. The community will be able to customize these data points for research and insights.

This grant will fund additional support to an existing grant with Strangelove to deploy and maintain Circle’s Cross Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) between dYdX Chain and Ethereum. The previous grant funded its development and relaying from Ethereum to dYdX Chain. This extension will fund the reverse direction, supporting withdrawals from dYdX Chain back to Ethereum. The grant includes building out the infrastructure and maintaining a relayer from dYdX to Noble supporting withdrawals.

This is a grant to the Chaos Labs team to design and administer the dYdX Launch Incentives Program. The dYdX community has already approved the allocation of $20M in DYDX From the dYdX Chain Community Treasury for this initiative via a Snapshot vote. The Chaos Labs team will design the launch incentives distribution framework with community feedback and build a public-facing portal to be utilized by the community. The portal will be an all-encompassing data hub for v4, allowing for complete transparency across all markets and aggregating top-level data. When trading is live on dYdX v4, Chaos will conduct a thorough trading season analysis for each epoch, prepare transparency reports, and make recommendations for incentives distributions according to the incentives distribution framework. These recommendations will be decided upon by dYdX governance before rewards are distributed to traders.

The grants team engaged Chaos Labs to onboard as a service provider through a formal agreement: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11xOb0fTciB2bueUbHMdH7pD3lyj_yAdn/view. The scope of work included a New Asset Listing portal, LP Reward Reporting and Analysis, and a Market Maker Risk portal. After starting work, dYdX announced the transition to v4, including updates that clashed with these deliverables (new assets paused and potential sunsetting of LP rewards). In response, the agreement was put on pause to negotiate its continuation and possible repurposing to a new scope. Chaos had already completed $300,000 in deliverables by the time it was paused, making them entitled to this compensation. After exploring alternatives, we have decided to terminate this engagement in favor of other projects with Chaos.

In response to MEV and trade censorship issues, dYdX would like to explore the implementation of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (e.g. SGX server) on the protocol's validator set. TEEs would allow the protocol to manage client deployments and enable encrypted market order data, preventing censorship and frontrunning. The goal of this research is to explore the viability of TEEs as a solution to MEV. The team will experiment with bandwidth and order processing on TEEs, and develop a framework for implementing this as a solution. If the research is successful, and the dYdX community or contributors chooses to use the framework, the team will unlock an additional success fee.

This is a follow-on grant to the previous Dashboard grant. As part of this grant, Skip will run between 5 to 10 custom geo-distributed dYdX nodes, modified to catch and measure specific MEV events for the existing MEV dashboard. The team will maintain the dashboard, with database services, uptime, and ongoing development. The grant will include submitting PRs and updating the dashboard as needed to continue measuring relevant MEV data.

The Indexer is a core component of the dYdX v4 protocol architecture. The service will enable read-only querying of protocol data, giving clients (e.g. Frontend, Mobile application) more efficient access to orders, trades, accounts, and other important data points. You can read more about the Indexer here: https://dydx.exchange/blog/v4-deep-dive-indexer. The grants program will be funding Imperator to run an Indexer on the dYdX Testnet for three months. The grant will include a best effort to meet the following SLAs: 99% uptime, 24/7 response time, 100% response within 30min of pagerduty alerts, and redeploy readiness at least three times a week. The funding for this grant is split between fixed manpower costs and variable infrastructure costs. $30,000 will be paid each month for manpower. Imperator will bill the Grants program each month for the costs of running the Indexer, with a cap of $80,000 per month.

Sponsoring an event in Tokyo to promote dYdX through hands-on onboarding and community engagement. The event will include an overview of dYdX, the future dYdX v4 chain, and methods of participating in the protocol through delegations and contributor work. The goal of the event is to grow dYdX engagement across the crypto community in Tokyo. Hisashi and Charles from the dYdX Foundation will be attending the event.

Sponsoring a Cosmos related event in Seoul to promote dYdX across the ecosystem and engage with the developer community. Hisashi from the dYdX Foundation will be attending the event and speaking as representatives of the dYdX community. The grant will also include distributing dYdX Merch to further promote the brand name.

Sponsoring an event in Ukraine to promote dYdX through a community member workshop. The event included an overview of dYdX, perpetuals, and DeFi overall. The goal was to promote dYdX and onboard new users with a hands-on approach, while also engaging local community members and grow the ecosystem.

As part of our sponsorship of the Epic DeFi day in Portugal, we are sponsoring two active dYdX community members to attend and promote dYdX in person with Merch. This is an opportunity for community members to attend events, learn from speakers, and engage with other ecosystem participants while promoting dYdX.

Metanomics is hosting a hands-on, dYdX onboarding workshop in Antwerp, Belgium with 20 - 50 attendees. This event will cover educational content on DEXs, Perpetuals, and walk users through onboarding to dYdX and trading on the platform. Attendees will leave with a new account setup and hands-on experience with using the dYdX platform.

Espacio Cripto will be hosting a dYdX themed workshop in Mexico City that includes a talk on DeFi trading, hosting an experienced derivatives trader to discuss perpetuals and dYdX, and finally a community panel to discuss retail trading opportunities on dYdX. The event is expected to have at least 50 attendees in a popular Mexico City location.

Kagan released an in-depth paper exploring improvements to the dYdX Affiliate system ahead of v4 to improve engagement and protocol growth. The paper explores the current affiliate system used to attract new users and promote dYdX, outlines areas for immediate improvement, and explores existing systems across other protocols in a comparative analysis. The community and dYdX stakeholders can begin exploring new areas of growth in light of this research. The Grants program will be issuing a retroactive grant based on the initial findings and commitment to growing dYdX.

DSRV will support dYdX Chain testnet services for six months at launch, including 2 RPC endpoints, 2 Archive Nodes, a testnet faucet and ongoing monitoring/support. The services will be accessible to everyone through their website: https://www.allthatnode.com/. RPC endpoints and Archive nodes will make life much easier for new developers, builders, and contributors. We expect all future contributors to depend on these services to interact with the testnet.

This community member based in Vietnam will be building up the local dYdX community with a dedicated channel, local events, dYdX Vietnam Twitter, and media sponsorships.

This group of Turkish contributors have been working on DeFi content through video publishing. They've previously interviewed Foundation CEO Charles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJnKryt9noo. This project will see them publish 4 new dYdX deep dive videos for promotion in Turkey.

0xCLR has been writing Financial Health reports on behalf of the DAO for the past few epochs. Through this grant, the report will be scaled to include more information that will guide the community around decisions and understanding of the protocol's financial health. The report will include data on the treasury, spending activity, fees generated, and other important health factors to begin budgeting the future of the dYdX DAO.

EpicWeb3 is Web3 focused conference taking place in Lisbon on July 5th. The event is bringing together speakers from different areas of the industry with tons of experience to discuss areas of development and growth. We are sponsoring the event to include dYdX branding across the event, but will also use the sponsorship as a means of sending active community members to the event. dYdX branding and marketing will be performed as part of the sponsorship, but the goal is primarily to give community members a chance to attend and speak. We have two community members attending the event to represent the dYdX community and learn from industry leaders.

Heading into v4, the dYdX Chain will enable permissionless listing of new markets - similar to Uniswap's pool listing model but for perpetual markets. With that comes complicated questions and design mechanisms to mitigate risks, improve user experiences, and incentivize liquidity provisioning. To help us dig through these questions, Chaos Labs will be conducting research to deliver a clear framework outlining the design and requirements to enable permissionless listings.

Ahead of the v4 migration, a lot of questions are being asked around the impact on governance and the current delegate structure of dYdX. The Flipside Crypto team will be leveraging lessons learned from both Ethereum and Cosmos based protocols to produce insights for the dYdX protocol. The deliverable will include thoughts around ways to transition delegates and existing governance frameworks to the v4 Cosmos chain.

The current liquidity provider rewards formula includes a few different parameters for scoring providers on their quotes. This research will be exploring methods of optimizing these parameters to encourage better liquidity and improve the efficiency of the LP rewards program. The most significant update will be to the MaxSpread parameter, exploring competitive spreads across dYdX markets (currently set at 20bps for BTC and ETH, and 40bps on all others).

A top priority for dYdX v4 price oracles and liquidations is the development and release of VoteExtensions on the Cosmos SDK. VoteExtensions will allow validators to vote and agree on the oracle price at each block, enabling a more efficient price discovery and liquidation system for the protocol. Aleksandr is an experienced Cosmos developers that will prioritize the development of VoteExtensions to ensure release ahead of the dYdX mainnet. This will allow the integration and testing of VoteExtensions on dYdX v4 ahead of mainnet launch. This grantee will be working closely with the other grant in similar scope.

A top priority for dYdX v4 price oracles and liquidations is the development and release of VoteExtensions on the Cosmos SDK. VoteExtensions will allow validators to vote and agree on the oracle price at each block, enabling a more efficient price discovery and liquidation system for the protocol. Skip Protocol are experienced Cosmos developers that will prioritize the development of VoteExtensions to ensure release ahead of the dYdX mainnet. This will allow the integration and testing of VoteExtensions on dYdX v4 ahead of mainnet launch. This team will be working closely with the other grant in similar scope.

LionDAO is hosting their annual hackathon in NY that brings together 300+ students to build projects in a three-day event. We are sponsoring the event to promote dYdX as a contributor-friendly protocol to engage active builders and future protocol contributors. We view this as a great opportunity to onboard new contributors, and Carl will attend the event as a judge to meet students actively building in person to talk about dYdX and dYdX Grants.

After successfully launching the dYdX Merch program, we are renewing the the program for an additional six months using the remaining funds on hand from the previous round. The funds will compensate the Toyoji team for resupplying stock, processing orders from internal partners (Foundation, Trading, Grants, Community) and online purchases, and maintaining Merch media accounts. The primary mission of the Merch program has transitioned to internal incentive driven, helping promote engagement and contributions through merchandise rewards.

With the upcoming dYdX Chain, the protocol will be dependent on the new Noble chain to support USDC collateral. Strangelove, as the lead developing team of Noble and experienced relayer in Cosmos, will support Noble relaying in testnet and mainnet launch to enable USDC deposits, and build a cross chain relayer ("CCTP"). The CCTP relayer will support relaying between dYdX Chain USDC and Ethereum ERC20 USDC for deposits and withdrawals, allowing users from Ethereum to continue trading on dYdX without having to first bridge their tokens.