At 23:00 on September 8th, Beijing time, the highly anticipated decentralized derivatives protocol dYdX will release airdrop rewards for early users and the first phase of mining rewards (a total of about 80 million DYDX, accounting for 8% of the total) ) For the participants, this will undoubtedly be an airdrop feast.
No wonder someone ridiculed last night:
“Weather forecast: There will be a tornado at 11 o’clock tomorrow night, and a lot of money will be drawn by then. Please block the social software such as Moments, Weibo, etc. in advance for friends who do not have DYDX airdrops. Beware of fomo.”
Readers who are interested in dYdX may want to know some important information about it, such as platform data, financing, user experience, initial token circulation, token usage, valuation, future prospects and risks, etc. Here we try Give answers one by one.
Financing situation and unlocking information of investment institutions
Since December 2017, dYdX has received a total of US$87 million in 4 rounds of financing. Investors include A16z, Polychain, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Paradigm, Delphi Digital and other industry leaders.
And these investment institutions will receive approximately 277 million DYDX tokens in 5 years (average cost is about 0.314 US dollars/piece). According to the unlocking rules issued by the project party, including investment institutions, dYdX teams and their advisors, these interest groups will After 18 months, unlock the first batch of tokens (30%), unlock the second batch of tokens (40%) linearly in the 19th to 24th months, and unlock the third batch of tokens linearly in the 25th to 36th months (20%), linearly unlock the last batch of tokens (10%) in the 37th-48th month.
In other words, in the next 18 months, the circulation of DYDX tokens will all come from the community (including retroactive airdrops, transaction mining, liquidity providing rewards, and staking rewards).
Three major uses of DYDX tokens
Then many friends will ask, what is the use of these DYDX tokens? According to official instructions, users can use DYDX tokens in three ways:
1. For governance, to propose or vote on changes to the agreement;
2. Enjoy discounts on transaction fees, as follows:
3. Staking to obtain pledge rewards: https://dydx.foundation/blog/en/safety-staking
(Note: A total of 25 million tokens will be used for staking incentives. Withdrawal will take 14 days)
As for whether the transaction fee of the platform will be included in the pledge reward, it depends on the community governance of dYdX in the later period.
dYdX platform data: mining incentive scheme stimulates volume trading, with a maximum daily trading volume of more than 2.5 billion US dollars
Let’s take a look at the data of the dYdX platform. According to the defi user data calculated by rchen8, the current number of dydx’s unique addresses is 60,859, an increase of 162 addresses from 1 month ago, and from October last year to March this year In the past 5 months, the number of independent addresses of dydx has increased by about 43,000 (an average of 8600 addresses per month). It can be seen that the user growth of the dYdX platform has been slowing down recently.
What is the truth?
In addition to being related to the overall downturn of the defi environment, this is actually related to the announcement of the DYDX token airdrop plan. Explain: Previously, many users used a large number of addresses to interact with the dYdX protocol in order to obtain potential airdrops. After the airdrop plan was announced, these users lost the motivation to brush their addresses.
However, based on Compound’s user data growth after the issuance of tokens, the author predicts that after dYdX’s tokens are officially released, its user data will also usher in a new growth period.
And another thing worth paying attention to is the transaction data of the dYdX platform.
According to statistics from coingecko, in the past 24 hours, the spot trading volume of the dydx platform was approximately US$46.6 million, while its derivatives trading volume reached US$813 million. In the same period, the trading volume of the leading DEX project Uniswap V3 was approximately US$46.6 million. US$2.75 billion.
On August 30, the trading volume of derivatives on the dydx platform also exceeded US$2.5 billion.
As shown in the figure above, the rapid increase in trading volume of the dydx platform is actually related to the announced trading and mining rules. Before the announcement of the plan, the daily trading volume of the dydx platform was about 32 million US dollars, and in the incentive plan After the announcement, the daily transaction volume of its platform increased by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and the closer to the end of each Epoch cycle, the crazier the transaction data of the platform grew. This obvious scalping also caused the project side. Attention.
On August 31, dYdXFoundation tweeted that any account marked as “Clear Wash Trading” by dYdX will be excluded from trading rewards. After the implementation of this measure, many adopt “hedging methods.” The trading rewards for large accounts who used the amount of scalping were cancelled, which eventually led to an increase in the number of rewards per capita for the remaining traders by about 30% (Note: In the end, the cost of obtaining coins for the first phase of DYDX transaction mining is about 2.5-3 U).
At present, the AMM derivatives agreement represents Perpetual Protocol, which can compete with dYdX. Its 7-day transaction data is about 760 million U.S. dollars (about 110 million U.S. dollars per day).
According to statistics from tokenterminal, in the past 7 days, Perpetual Protocol’s protocol revenue was approximately US$496,000, while dYdX’s protocol revenue was approximately US$1.5 million. The latter is approximately three times that of the former.
Up to now, regardless of the number of users, active users, transaction volume, agreement revenue and other data, dYdX is the No.1 of the defi derivatives agreement track, which may not be in the future for a long time. changes happened.
As for the valuation issues that many people are concerned about, let’s conservatively predict: the overall valuation of the dYdX project will exceed Perp, but considering that the initial circulation of dYdX only accounts for 8% of the total (in contrast, the circulation of perp The volume currently accounts for 30% of the total), it is expected that the initial market value of dYdX will be slightly higher than perp, or equivalent to the latter.
Question: Can the circulation of dYdX tokens drive the entire DeFi derivatives track?
We have basically determined the dominant position of dYdX in the DeFi derivatives track above. Then one question that everyone may be concerned about is: Can the circulation of dYdX tokens drive the entire DeFi derivatives track?
To answer this question, we need to solve three questions first?
- What are the recent data changes in the DeFi derivatives track?
- How is the user experience of dYdX?
- Based on the currently available information, speculate on future data changes.
For the first question, we have already mentioned part of it above. From the perspective of transaction volume, whether it is dYdX or perp, their platform transaction volume has shown an explosive growth trend in the near future (Note: dydx increased by 441% from the previous month , Perp increased by approximately 31.88% from the previous month).
In terms of project valuation, some derivatives agreement tokens have also experienced a wave of hype in advance (Note: DDX’s market value has increased by 168% in the past month, and its DerivaDEX trading products are not yet online).
It can be seen that these DeFi derivative agreements are more or less affected by the “big brother” dydx.
The second question, how does dydx’s user experience do?
In the early stage, because dydx is a contract deployed on the Ethereum main network, its experience is very bad (especially the problem of expensive transaction fees and slow transactions), but as dydx migrates to StarkWare’s second-tier network StarkEx, These problems that plague users have been effectively improved.
In the extreme market last night, the dydx platform did not experience any downtime, which is indeed commendable, but according to individual users’ reactions, dydx is still stuck.
The third question, what will be the future data changes of dYdX and the entire derivatives track?
Assuming that the performance of dYdX tokens after circulation meets (or even exceeds) our expectations above, then the incentives for transaction mining (the number of tokens per month remains unchanged) will attract more traders to participate in dydx transactions, and finally this month The overall data may increase more than 2 times compared with last month.
The increase in data will likely push up the market’s expectations for the valuation of dydx tokens, thus forming a “flywheel”.
In the end, the entire defi derivatives track is expected to usher in a wave of growth driven by dYdX in the short term.
Regulatory concerns
It should be noted that the market recently reported that the US SEC is investigating Uniswap Labs, the development team behind Uniswap. Obviously, the US regulators have noticed the DeFi agreement, and dydx, as the seed project of the derivatives track, will naturally be regulated. Special attention of the party.
In order to cope with the relevant regulatory risks, dYdX first stripped off the role of token reward distribution to the foundation; DEX is listed and traded, and whether these measures can prevent it from being subject to the hammer of supervision, we still don’t know.
One final warning: Ethereum gas costs will probably soar to a terrible figure tonight, please pay attention to your own affordability.