November '22

Highlights

• Seven grants approved with a total of $84,500 in funding
• New initiatives posted to tackle important projects (MEV, multi-asset collateral, basis trading, and community workshops)
• AMAs hosted with grantees to share completed projects
• Three completed grants and exciting updates from ongoing grantees

Funding Rounds

In November, the DGP issued seven grants for a total of $84,500 in funding. As you can see below, this was among the smaller months in terms of how many grants were funded and the size of grants. 

Recent market events (you know the ones we’re talking about!) and the general slowdown in crypto markets has understandably impacted the number of quality grants applicants. Having said that, we have no intention of backing down: the DGP will continue investing in teams and individuals building for dYdX regardless of what’s happening with the market. Great builders build in any market climate — if you’re considering applying for a grant to do something great for dYdX, there’s no better time than now.

The Grants program has now issued 86 grants for a total of $2,790,230 in funding.

In November, four grants were issued under the International Growth budget and the remaining three in the Other Grants budget.

As the chart above shows, International Growth and Other Grants have large budgets earmarked for future use. We hope to see more applications for these budget categories.

Completed Grants

Below we’d like to share updates on grants that have been completed in the past month:

Risk Parameter Framework

Considered Finance recently published in-depth research on the optimization of risk parameters for dYdX, namely the margin and position size parameters. As we look towards community ownership of risk  in V4, this research will be invaluable to helping inform what  optimal parameters should be. The paper and summary can be found in this Commonwealth post.

Trading Simulator

Invsto released a trading simulator to help traders build and simulate strategies across different market conditions. The tool includes support for volatility pricing, technical analysis, and integrations with additional tools like QuantStats to add performance metrics. We encourage new users to watch the Tutorial first to better understand the simulator.

Metagals dYdX Workshop

The Metagals team hosted their first dYdX workshop. The team is based in Mexico City, and is on mission to onboard more Latin American Women to crypto. The workshop introduced DeFi, perpetuals, and dYdX to a group of 38 attendees with a guest speaker from a local institutional trading desk. A follow-on workshop will be hosted in December.

Ongoing Grants Progress

We continue to see exciting progress from our other active grantees. 

Merchandise Campaign

The team is hard at work releasing a top of the line collection of dYdX themed merchandise to build brand awareness. The team recently released a sign-up page ahead of their public launch. They also hosted an AMA, that included a lucky winner of a merch package giveaway. We are super excited to see the team progress with the public launch expected for December.

Hummingbot Market Making bots

As a popular trading client for developers, Hummingbot is building an integration to dYdX with Market Making bots to attract new users. In their latest release, the team refactored the dYdX connector to their highest standard, leading the way for bots to be built. This was the initial groundwork to completing the grant with Market Making bots publicly launched.

Academy Page Project

The Academy Page will host a series of educational materials to improve the onboarding experience and engage our community. The project is advancing productively, with lots of great updates on the final website and user experience. Ahead of the expected launch in January, we funded two content contributors to produce original material that will lead the new page.

Copy Trading Testnet Platform - CLOSED

This grant set out to build a copy trading platform on testnet to trial the user experience and enthusiasm for copy trading. Unfortunately, the team leading this grant has had to drop out due to conflicting priorities and market conditions. The initial funding delivered of $13,000 has been returned to the grants multisig. While we did not lose any funding on this project, we regret seeing the team drop out given our excitement for the work.

Application Data

We saw an increase in applications from the previous month, with a total of 40 applicants in November.

Operational Updates

DYDX Sale

Last month, we sold 200,000 DYDX for 485,062 USDC at an average price of $2.425 per token. This sale was conducted through a 48 hour Time-Weighted-Average-Price (“TWAP”) algorithm. We use the TWAP strategy to limit market impact by splitting the order into smaller quantities.

This USDC covers costs associated with operating the DGP. It also allows the DGP to fund U.S.-based grantees who are prohibited from receiving DYDX-based grants.

Following this sale, the DGP has sold 45% of the DYDX it received (As a reminder, the DGP was granted permission to sell up to 50% of the DYDX it holds as part of the governance proposals for DGP v1 and v1.5).

Expenses

The grants program paid out the following expenses in November:

Conclusion

Looking ahead to December, we’re excited to find high-quality teams to work on our latest initiatives and continue to onboard new contributors to dYdX. We’re hoping to end the month strong as we look to close out the first year of dYdX Grants!

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