dYdX
6.7/10 total
A perpetuals exchange that migrated from a StarkWare rollup to its own Cosmos SDK chain in late 2023, where validators run the order book off-chain in memory and commit fills on-chain. Keys stay yours and there is no account signup. In November 2023 an apparent targeted manipulation of the YFI market on the older v3 deployment forced roughly $9M out of the v3 insurance fund to cover liquidation shortfalls; no customer funds were lost and about $13.5M remained in that fund.
Scores
Weights are published in the method and applied identically to every entry.
For
- No account, no email, no identity verification: authentication is a wallet signature
- 0.050% base taker and 0.020% base maker, going to zero maker fees above $50M of 30-day volume
- Non-custodial: collateral sits in your own account on the dYdX chain under your keys, not in an operator's wallet
- Protocol, validator software and the reference front end are all open source, so a self-hosted or alternative front end is possible
- Absorbed the November 2023 YFI manipulation out of the insurance fund without socialising losses onto other traders
Against
- November 2023: roughly $9M of the v3 insurance fund was consumed covering YFI liquidation shortfalls after what the team called a targeted attack, which shows the risk-parameter surface is exploitable
- The reference front end restricts access for residents of the United States, Canada and other jurisdictions, and requires accepting Terms of Use before trading
- Order matching happens in validator memory rather than on-chain, so fill fairness rests on the validator set behaving, not on verifiable execution
- Perpetuals only on its own chain, so you cannot use it to acquire or move spot assets across chains
- Every position, fill and liquidation is publicly attributable to your address; the front end sees your IP, and there is no onion service or no-JavaScript path
Agent access 8/10
Public indexer REST and WebSocket APIs plus open-source Python and TypeScript clients, with orders signed by your own Cosmos key and no account or issued API credential. An agent needs a funded dYdX chain account and a Cosmos signing client, which is more setup than a plain EVM wallet.
Reported separately and not counted in the total. It measures what an autonomous agent can do unattended, not whether the service is safe to use.
Fees
0.05% taker / 0.02% maker (base tier)
Six tiers keyed to 30-day volume: 0.020% maker and 0.050% taker below $1M, then 0.015%/0.040% at $1M, 0.010%/0.035% at $5M, 0.005%/0.030% at $10M, 0.000%/0.025% at $50M, and a VIP tier above $200M. Holding a Hedgies NFT applies a 3% discount to fees. Tiers are governance-adjustable parameters on the dYdX chain, not a fixed commercial schedule.
Specification
- Type
- On-chain DEX
- KYC policy
- No KYC
- Custody model
- onchain
- Account required
- no
- Assets
- perpetual markets, low hundreds
- Chains
- 1 (own Cosmos chain)
- Operating since
- 2017
- Jurisdiction
- undisclosed
- Onion service
- no
- Works without JS
- no
- Open source
- yes
- Facts checked
- 2026-07-31
Links
Plain links, no referral parameters. Verify the domain yourself; phishing clones of every service in this table exist.