Why dYdX Needs to Stop, Rethink, and Start Over

dYdX Chain
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This post is intended to provide feedback. The goal is not to undermine the work that has been done, but to offer an external, no-bullshit perspective from someone outside the bubble of those building and running dYdX.

What is the plan here, honestly?

You have repeatedly shown that you cannot anticipate or design around the fundamental limitations of the exchange. It is clear that the current system is too complex, even for the team that built it.

We have seen time and time again that the v4 architecture is nowhere near suitable for trading.

The decision to transition to v4 was a mistake. Everyone knows it, including the team, yet we continue to force it anyway. It has been years of wasted effort. Decentralization is irrelevant if the product itself is unusable. Nobody cares about decentralization if they are losing money because the product does not work.

Can the developers please snap out of the illusion that v4 will somehow “become” functional?

It has not worked for years. And by “worked,” I mean delivering a trading platform that people can actually rely on, not something that occasionally fills an order under the most forgiving market conditions.

We cannot even handle 250 million dollars in daily volume and a mere 1,000 to 2,000 daily users without the chain halting for eight hours because of a black swan event. 250 million dollars! And yet the stated vision is to “trade anything” and “democratize finance.”

We have burned through tens of millions in incentives and rewards. Do you not see why they are not working? We do not attract or retain users because they try the exchange and quickly realize it is inferior to every other platform they have used. The product simply is not good. It really is that simple.

You have asked for feedback in countless ways. Are you truly unaware that the exchange is slow and has already experienced outages? Why does anything else matter if you have not, or cannot, fix that? Everything else is secondary.

What are we even doing?

It is obvious the team is not made up of traders and does not understand trading. That has been clear over and over again. You have no understanding of the importance of speed. You have no understanding of the importance of uptime. And the reason is simple: none of you have ever traded professionally.

If you had, you would never sacrifice speed or reliability for the sake of decentralization, especially considering that you are targeting professional traders.

The team likely has strengths in other areas, and that is fine. But maybe it is time to step back, honestly assess what those strengths are, and build a product around them.

Forget the “trade anything” narrative. Right now, you cannot even support ETH and BTC reliably, yet you are already talking about RWAs, spot trading, and everything else. You are completely out of touch with reality, and it is painfully obvious to anyone observing the development of the protocol, everyone, it seems, except the people developing it.

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The topic aligns perfectly with the ones I’ve created.
We definitely need radical changes. The market is growing, while our metrics are going down the drain — that’s no coincidence, it’s the result of everything we’ve done so far
We either change (quick), or we can keep releasing 1.5 useless updates a year (like telegram trading, the oAuth login, wtf) and go to zero.
I suggest increasing the token buyback so the chart doesn’t look like a joke — nobody will take a project seriously when its price keeps tanking nonstop for four years. That’s the most basic and obvious indicator of a project’s health.
Also, change the network — Cosmos, objectively speaking, is a garbage made for masochists nothing more to add here. Once that’s done, everything else will start to move forward. We need to face reality, not live in illusions.

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Yep! What’s the plan? Even with all the rewards, no users! Something as to change. Where is @antonio? Not one word regarding the latest issue.

We are losing market share, revenue, token value. The competition is fierce and DYDX isn’t going anywhere if nothing changes.

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I agree. My experience using the platform confirms your words, I have something to compare it to, and I don’t want to get into the details. As for the issue of retaining the community, here’s a current example: as you’ve already heard, when the Ethereum network closed, we lost a significant part of our community (roughly tens of thousands of people). These are potential users of the platform. Is dYdX interested in bringing them back under its wing, or will it leave it at that? I don’t think they have any desire to do so.

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the 8 hour outage was due to: 1) too decentralized, we spent 3-4 hours alone trying to get enough validators to run the patched binary, 2) the crash was due to a single bug where a single trader that holds the entire open interest in an isolated market gets liquidated, this bug is fixed.

on topic #1, the Foundation and DOS are working on improving escalation procedures with top validators, and on #2 the v9.3 upgrade fixed the bug.

on performance topic, the order latency has dropped to median 0.26 second! which is 10x improvment from May 2025!

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I completely agree with this viewpoint. The market share has dropped significantly, which directly reduces the exchange’s revenue — leading to a decline in both the token price and staking rewards. If nothing changes, dYdX will soon lose the race for the perpetual DEX market against Hyperliquid and Aster, and eventually die out.

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Honestly all of the competitors are new platforms offering the promise of airdrops, not sure how dydx can compete with that. Doesn’t matter if the platform is working or not or decentralized, most people just want to make money. Maybe the team should work on a complete rebrand, change the name even.

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