🔥 dYdX (DYDX) surges 35% overnight: Is the old DEX king coming back—or just a flash in the pan?
Bro, I woke up last night and looked at the chart—DYDX straight up to $0.215, up 35% in 24 hours. Trading volume hit $57 million, three to four times its usual pace. I blinked like I’d misread it. This long-established decentralized perpetual contracts exchange, the one that Hyperliquid had been grinding down, is it finally going to rise again?
Alright, let’s break down what dYdX really is, and whether this rally actually makes sense.
1. What is dYdX? In one sentence: a Binance-style contracts venue, but decentralized.
dYdX is an on-chain perpetual futures trading exchange. You can go long/short BTC, ETH, and more without depositing to a CEX—your wallet connects directly and your funds stay in your control. The v4 version moved to Cosmos, running on its own chain. The order book and matching engine are fully on-chain. With 200+ trading pairs and up to 25x leverage, it’s all about a professional trading experience. Total trading volume is close to $1.6 trillion—yes, trillion-level.
2. Is the founding team reliable?
Founder Antonio Juliano, a Princeton CS graduate, worked as a backend engineer at Coinbase and Uber. He founded dYdX in 2017. In May 2024, he stepped back to become Chairman, handing the CEO role to Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, who also has a Princeton background. The team’s credentials are solid: top VCs like a16z, Paradigm, and Polychain invested around $87 million before and after. In DeFi circles, this is basically top-tier.
But let’s be honest: after Hyperliquid rose, dYdX’s daily activity and trading volume were crushed. Hyperliquid does $7 billion a day, while dYdX only does $100–300 million. Even in the community, people are discussing whether dYdX should move again—from Cosmos to Solana or Ethereum. The founder himself admitted that a “new direction” is needed.
3. The real reason behind this rally?
1. Volume and price move together—on June 23, the surge came with volume up 115%. This time it kept scaling and broke out on continued heavy volume. This isn’t fake volume pumped by “liquidity farming” crews—it’s real. 2. v5 updates—released in June, v5 brought new features that improved the trading experience. 3. Surge Season 15 event—BTC and BONK perpetuals with zero fees; if you lose, they reimburse part of it. A win-win-win situation for traders, so they naturally come back. 4. dYdX’s official X post teased a “big announcement”—saying it’s not just a feature update, not a new market, but an entirely new direction. The market loves this, and expectations are fully priced in.
4. My take
Short term: this rise with both volume and price increasing is genuinely buying strength. The $0.20 resistance level is already holding, and the next target is $0.25–$0.30. But there’s a big issue in the mid term: Hyperliquid’s liquidity “black hole” effect is too strong. If dYdX is only relying on incentive events to pull volume, once the incentives end, it could cool off again.
The key is what that “big announcement” actually is. If it’s migrating to a higher-performance chain, or launching a full-category DEX covering both spot and perps, then that would be a true game changer. If it’s just a new market or a minor optimization—then this 35% is simply an oversold bounce.
Position advice: take small size and trade one first—set a stop-loss at $0.18. Don’t go all-in out of hype; wait for the announcement before deciding whether to add. Remember: in the derivatives track of DeFi, being the #2 is the most dangerous spot.
The above is not investment advice—DYOR. Follow me and let’s wait together for the big dYdX news.