Data & Insights on DGP v1.5

We’re excited to share a more in-depth quarterly update for dYdX Grants. This update will be formatted in two sections: the first is a brief report on the latest month of grants while the second gives a breakdown of each grant funded.

We’d like to note that gathering data on the current version of dYdX can be tricky, meaning that we can’t always track the results of grants in a rigorous and quantitative way. For example, data from the exchange is not available to the public. For marketing projects, we have used referral links to track user onboarding and trading data. For all other projects, we use external data points and qualitative assessments to infer the impact from the grant.

Looking ahead to v4, we’re excited to see changes in data accessibility (more data will be publicly available).

dYdX Grants - Quick Update

In March, the DGP issued five grants for a total of $190,000 in funding. We have now funded a total of 100 grants with over $3.1M in funding throughout the life of dYdX Grants.

We’re really excited to start funding a new category of grants — protocol infrastructure. As dYdX v4 approaches, we’ll be focusing our efforts on supporting the development of the protocol through funding grantees that can help make dYdX v4 a massive success. For example, we funded work to bring ETH-USDC to dYdX v4 on Cosmos. In addition, we funded work to bring state-of-the-art oracles to dYdX v4, which will give the protocol an accurate price feed on day one.

March saw a huge uptick in applications submitted to the program, reaching 52 new applications. This is up from 36 applications in the previous month. We credit this increase in part to the launch of Blockworks’s new Grant platform, but also increased interest in dYdX following v4 announcements.

Program Updates

We launched two new charts that improve the understanding of our internal processes for grants. The application lifecycle provides an overview of an application from start to finish, and the grants lifecycle offers a similar flow for an application that has been approved.

The team is migrating to a new spreadsheet that will provide a full breakdown of all payments and expenses. This is to improve tracking of all DGP related payments and costs.

dYdX Grants v1.5 - Data & Insights

Highlights from Grants v1.5

Since launching in August 2022, the current iteration of the grants program has worked with exciting projects driving significant impact to the dYdX protocol. Below, we highlight a few of our favorite grants:

CCTP Relayer and Noble Relaying

Strangelove Labs are hard at work on a local iteration of Circle’s Cross Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) that will enable depositing and withdrawing ERC20 USDC with the dYdX v4. This project will give existing users of dYdX a seamless onboarding experience to dYdX’s Cosmos based chain.

Liquidity and Safety Module Research

Xenophon Labs’s research and subsequent proposals to sunset the Liquidity and Safety modules have resulted in millions of dollars worth of DYDX being reallocated to the Community treasury. Through this initiative, the community is growing its firepower to spend on future initiatives.

MEV Research & Dashboard

Skip Protocol and Chorus One have both been hard work to understand and build a strategy for tracking MEV on dYdX v4. MEV stands to become the biggest driver of trader experiences and value extraction in dYdX v4. The work being done by both teams will be highly influential in driving the community’s position towards addressing this problem.

VoteExtensions Development

Skip Protocol and Bez from Binary Builders are heads down on developing VoteExtensions for the CosmosSDK, a cornerstone feature for dYdX v4 that will be used for price oracles.

These grants, and many more, continue to drive growth and development of the dYdX protocol through external contributions. We’re excited to continue working on shaping the v4 protocol.

Data from Completed Grants

In this section, we take a granular look at all of the grants completed in the v1.5 program to determine success and impact. We have grouped grants within relevant categories to standardize metrics and allow for comparative assessment. We can also use the categorical approach to explore success across funding targets and guide future grant initiatives.

Research Grants‍

Marketing / Growth Grants

‍Tooling Grants

‍dYdX Academy Project

For the Academy project, we have combined all Academy related grants into the same category and applied an overarching measure of impact issued across all of the work done.

The Academy project had a successful launch with high counts of visitors and signups. The use of POAPs seems to have driven a lot of interest in the website, giving the launch a splash effect. The result was increased brand awareness and dYdX marketing through social media. The project received very positive feedback. The Academy is now in the process of being transitioned to a permanent home to scale, improve SEO, and convert visitors to users.

dYdX Merch Project

Similarly, we have combined all Merch related grants within the same category to determine the overall impact of the initiative.

The dYdX Merch program had a successful launch and is now a valuable resource for brand building and contributor engagement. The use of dYdX merch as an internal reward mechanism has been popular, playing a significant role in community participation.

Conclusion

Looking ahead to v4, we’re excited to continue funding projects that help shape the new protocol. We'll continue to leverage metrics and insights to shape our funding targets. Protocol research, infrastructure for v4, and growth initiatives will be our primary targets heading into dYdX v4.

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