Eight years of operating leveraged derivatives without losing user funds is the most valuable sentence in this review. Perpetual venues fail in messy ways — bad debt, oracle manipulation, liquidation cascades — and dYdX has navigated multiple violent markets without one, which is why its security mark is the highest in the category at 9.
What v4 changed
The original dYdX ran an off-chain order book with StarkEx settlement. v4 moved to a sovereign Cosmos chain where validators run the order book in memory and settle on-chain, removing the central operator entirely. Trading fees now accrue to validators and stakers rather than to a company. It is the most genuinely decentralised order-book venue in production.
Costs and execution
Fees run roughly 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker, tiering with volume. Depth on BTC and ETH is solid; on smaller markets it is thinner than Hyperliquid's. Funding is competitive and the risk engine — margin requirements, insurance fund, liquidation logic — is conservative and well documented. For traders who care more about not being liquidated by an oracle glitch than about the last basis point of spread, that conservatism is the product.
The trade-offs
The migration cost users: some did not want to bridge to a new chain, and the interface and integrations reset. US residents are geo-blocked from the main product, following the regulatory posture the protocol adopted years ago. And as an app-chain, its security depends on the value staked to its own validator set rather than on Ethereum.
Who should use dYdX
Traders who prioritise a clean risk record and genuine decentralisation over maximum depth. For the largest orders, Hyperliquid or a centralised venue will fill better. For everything else, dYdX remains one of the two or three venues in this category we would use without hesitation.