Targets for dYdX Grants Program v1.5

dYdX is on a mission to become the world’s leading crypto trading platform, tackled now through the launch of its own chain. The Grants program is in a unique position to support this mission with a focus on user growth and protocol research ahead of the launch.

Below, we have outlined a few areas that are vital to dYdX’s long-term success as a decentralized exchange. There’s multiple ways to tackle these areas, and we leave it to grants applicants to propose their own, unique solutions. Our aim is to inspire existing and new contributors to apply using these targets.

International Growth

Growing dYdX users, community members, and brand awareness across an international scope is one of the most impactful goals for this round of the Grants program. dYdX is a global protocol and has users and stakeholders all around the world (a look at the language Discord channels is good evidence of this). As such, substantial funding will focus on:

• Community Engagement (initiatives to farm users in specific regions)‍
• Partnerships & Sponsorships
• Events
• Marketing
• Content & Education

These efforts will be International in the sense that we expect the grants to target specific regions with a large Total Addressable Market (“TAM”). We measure a region’s TAM through the size of their crypto communities and the history of active market participation. Some of these had already been targeted with small grants in v1, such as Japan and Turkey. We will apply the lessons learned to significantly scale up efforts across many more regions.

Research and Design

The new chain migration opens questions around Governance, Token Design, Rewards, as well as a new class of protocol participants - Validators. New dynamics will evolve between users, validators, and possibly MEV searchers. To prepare ourselves for this new environment, we believe there are opportunities for in-depth research and thoughtful design considerations around protocol parameters. Funding will focus on the following efforts:

• Protocol Rewards & Emissions
• Token Design & Implementation
• DAO Structure & Governance
• Validators & Cosmos Space
• MEV support/protection

Moving away from short-term to longer term, high-level research permits our efforts to remain relevant in a V4 setting while helping the community to think today about important challenges to come.

Cosmos Integration

As dYdX begins to shift from Ethereum to Cosmos and IBC, we think it’s important to start integrating with the Cosmos community to onboard new users and contributors. Technical contributors will need to be familiar with Cosmos and its native requirements to build for dYdX. We expect to see more opportunities for external developers to make technical contributions in the V4 setting. As such, we aim to fund grants with efforts to promote and market dYdX in the Cosmos space. Funding may include:

• Events & Hackathon Sponsorship
• Public Goods Funding
• Marketing

Other Grants

We still intend to fund grants outside of the above targets, and are always open to hearing new ideas. But we want applicants to be cognizant of the prioritization that will go into funding grants concentrated around these goals. 

Note on Previous Efforts

An avid follower of the v1 program might notice the shift away from Community Tooling and Third Party integrations. Although we are very supportive of the grants issued in these categories, and recommend all users to check out existing tools built, we do not think they would maximize the impact potential for grants ahead of V4. Generally speaking, it will be difficult for tools and integrations built today to carry over on the new chain and product. Once the new chain is launched, we expect to redirect substantial efforts towards tools and integrations. For now, focusing our efforts on user growth and long lasting research will maximize impact.