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FAQs

Find answers to frequently asked questions.

To significantly scale trading, dYdX and StarkWare have built a Layer 2 protocol for cross-margined perpetuals, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s Perpetual smart contracts. Traders can expect significantly lower gas costs, and in turn, much lower trading fees and minimum trade sizes.

StarkWare zkSTARKS technology is a form of ZK-Rollup technology that significantly increases dYdX’s trade settlement capacity, while still basing its security on the underlying Ethereum blockchain. StarkWare’s dYdX integration combines STARK proofs for data integrity with on-chain data availability to ensure a fully non-custodial protocol. Trades are settled on a Layer 2 system, which publishes zero-knowledge proofs periodically to an Ethereum smart contract in order to prove that state transitions within Layer 2 are valid.

Ethereum can process around 15 transactions per second (TPS), which is not enough to support the hypergrowth of DeFi, NFTs, and more. While Ethereum 2.0 will theoretically boost network speeds to 100,000 TPS, base layer scaling is still a while away. In the meantime, Layer 2 scaling solutions — in the forms of Rollups – free up Ethereum's base layer by offloading execution, leading to reduced gas costs and increased throughput without increasing network load. StarkWare’s dYdX integration combines STARK proofs for data integrity with on-chain data availability to ensure a fully non-custodial protocol.

In order to address immediate scaling issues, dYdX's engineering team did extensive due diligence on various Layer 2 solutions and other Layer 1s.

Overall, StarkWare was able to provide by far the best trading experience for our users in the shortest amount of time. Other Layer 1s do not yet have the collateral base and building blocks such as wallets and developer tools that have made Ethereum successful. While other Layer 2 solutions, such as optimistic rollups, are potentially promising, they are not as battle tested, don’t offer quite the same product experience (very long withdrawal times), and cannot offer the same level of decentralization & cryptographic guarantees as ZK-Rollups.

Ultimately, we wanted a solution that could be live on mainnet within months, rather than an undefined period of time. StarkWare has already been running spot-trading exchanges in production, and has a stellar reputation in the industry around security and expertise.

StarkWare develops software to improve blockchain scalability by allowing any type of computation to move off-chain, using the Ethereum blockchain as a public immutable commitment layer. Focusing on scalability, StarkWare has the fastest in-class technology for asserting computational integrity via succinct, transparent, and post-quantum-secure proofs.

ZK-Rollups are a type of Layer 2 scaling solution which bundle or “rollup” transactions into a single batch, which is then posted to the Ethereum blockchain alongside a proof attesting to the validity of the bundled transactions. Further, ZK-Rollups allow user balance data on Layer 2 to be available on Layer 1. Scalability benefits in rollups come from moving the expensive computational work off-chain, and only verifying the proof attesting to the validity of the state transition on-chain.

ZK-Rollups offer high throughput, instant finality (no risk of trade rollbacks), self-custody, and privacy for your trading strategy. Therefore, they are well suited to the high-value exchange use case. Further, in the event of a system hack, all the data needed to reclaim user's funds on an escape event is present on the Ethereum blockchain - there are no additional trust assumptions.

Rollups today can offer over 100× scaling benefits without ETH 2. According to Vitalik Buterin, “if everyone moves to rollups, we will soon have ~3,000 TPS. Once ETH phase 1 comes along and rollups move to eth2 sharded chains for their data storage, we go up to a theoretical max of ~100,000 TPS. Eventually, phase 2 will come along, bringing eth2 sharded chains with native computations, which give us ~1,000-5,000 TPS.” While Ethereum 2.0 will theoretically boost network speeds to 100,000 TPS, base layer scaling is still a while away. There is increasing competition among various flavors in the rollup space with the trend being towards EVM compatibility and incorporating optionality for dApps depending on their needs.

We are launching a closed alpha for our cross-margined Perpetuals in mid-February. A full production launch will be available a few weeks later, once the operating status of the system has been thoroughly tested. Users can join our waitlist and will be notified when the full production is available.

With cross margining and increased scalability, we will be able to launch many more markets on dYdX. During the alpha period, we will support Perpetuals for BTC-USD, ETH-USD, and LINK-USD, with many more pairs coming soon. We plan to launch 30+ new Perpetual Contracts over the course of 2022. We are focused on listing DeFi tokens, as well as the most traded cryptocurrency pairs by volume.

Trades are batched off-chain in ZK-Rollups with validity proofs submitted on-chain, reducing the amount of gas required per-trade. We are able to pass on those savings to traders in the form of reduced trading fees across the board. We have released a new volume-weighted maker-taker fee schedule that will be more competitive with fees on centralized exchanges.

All Perpetual Contracts will be settled and margined in USDC.

For deposits, users can deposit funds to their account by sending a Layer 1 Ethereum transaction, specifying the amount, their position (vault) id, and their Stark Key through their wallet. Users can deposit USDC, or any other supported asset which can be converted to USDC on-chain via the 0x API. After the deposit transaction is mined, 10 Ethereum network confirmations (usually around 3 minutes) are required for your funds to be available to trade.

Two types of withdrawals will be supported: Slow and Fast Withdrawals. Slow withdrawals must wait for a Layer 2 batch to be proved before they are processed. Layer 2 batches are proved roughly once every few hours, though this could be more or less frequent based on network conditions. Slow withdrawals occur in two steps: first the user requests a slow withdrawal, then once the next Layer 2 batch is proved the user must send a Layer 1 Ethereum transaction to claim their funds.

Fast withdrawals utilize a withdrawal liquidity provider to send funds immediately and do not require users to wait for a Layer 2 batch to be proved. Users do not need to send any Layer 1 transactions to perform a fast withdrawal. Behind the scenes, the withdrawal liquidity provider will immediately send a transaction to Ethereum which, once mined, will send the user their funds. Users must pay a fee to the liquidity provider for fast withdrawals, and withdrawals are subject to a maximum size based on available liquidity.

Since there are smaller fees per-trade at the network layer, we are able to decrease minimum trade sizes, allowing traders to try out dYdX with less initial capital.

Traders will be able to trade on multiple Perpetual Contracts using a single margin account, allowing for dramatically increased capital efficiency while trading multiple pairs. Collateral is held as USDC, and the quote asset for all perpetual markets is USD. Each market has two risk parameters, the initial margin fraction and the maintenance margin fraction, which determine the maximum leverage available within that market. These are used to calculate the value that must be held by an account in order to open or increase positions (in the case of initial margin) or avoid liquidation (in the case of maintenance margin).

We are now offering higher leverage – up to 25× – on dYdX for certain Perpetual Contracts. While some centralized exchanges offer over 100× leverage, most traders trade using low double digit leverage at most, and traders are prone to losing funds quickly at such high amounts of leverage.

StarkEx doesn't publish all transaction details on-chain, but instead only the balance changes. Therefore, privacy is greatly enhanced as traders do not need to worry about proprietary trading strategies being replicated, or trading activity being monitored.

Trades are matched off-chain and held in batches, until the proof of the validity of the batch is submitted on-chain, where it lives permanently. This prevents front-running of trade settlement and allows for instantaneous balance updates without waiting for a transaction to be mined. Trading on dYdX will feel every bit as fast as trading on a centralized exchange.

Most wallets will support trading on Layer 2. StarkWare's utilizes separate public & private keys from your Ethereum keys. Currently, most wallets will integrate with StarkWare in the following way:

1 – dYdX’s website running in your browser will generate your private stark keys deterministically based on a signature from your wallet. Since the keys are generated deterministically, your same wallet can later be used to regenerate your stark keys if needed. Your stark keys are never sent to dYdX's servers or anywhere else, they are held directly by you in your browser.

2 – Your private Stark Key will then be used to sign any transactions you agreed to on Layer 2. These signatures are automatically performed by the website running on your machine as needed.

More and more wallets have native integrations with StarkWare’s technology (Ledger nanoS, Authereum, and more to come). Such integration will allow the private stark key to be stored in the wallet, rather than in the browser.

Given the performance improvements of the oracles, we will be able to offer lower margin requirements, which means both higher maximum leverage as well as lower penalties when liquidated. Accounts whose total value falls below the maintenance margin requirement may have their positions automatically closed by the dYdX liquidation engine. Profits or losses from liquidations are taken on by the insurance fund.

dYdX is currently focused on derivatives trading. We will continue to support spot & margin trading, and will consider moving these to Layer 2 in the future.

After the public launch of Layer 2, our Layer 1 Perpetuals product will continue to run in parallel with Layer 2. After a few weeks, Layer 1 Perpetuals will be wound down, and users will need to close their positions on Layer 1 and then open new positions on Layer 2.

StarkEx is a STARK-powered scalability engine for crypto exchanges. StarkEx uses cryptographic proofs to attest to the validity of a batch of transactions (such as trades and transfers) and updates a commitment to the state of the exchange on-chain. StarkEx allows exchanges to provide non-custodial trading at scale with high liquidity and lower costs. StarkEx currently supports ETH, ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens, and can readily support tokens on other EVM-compatible blockchains. StarkEx is a mature platform that has been deployed on Ethereum mainnet since June 2020.

dYdX users are identified within the exchange by their Stark Key, which is a public key defined over a STARK-friendly elliptic curve. It is distinct from the elliptic curve implemented by Ethereum. In order to associate traders with addresses, a user must first sign a message linking their Ethereum address to a Stark Key, and register the Stark Key on dYdX’s smart contract before any other user operation can take place.

Cairo is the first production-grade platform for generating STARK proofs for general computation. It is Turing Complete, and highly efficient. StarkWare has begun offering Cairo developer tools. Cairo allows faster development and more flexibility in the types of things that are proven by Stark Proofs. This allows our more-novel code to run and for future changes to take place at a faster rate.It also eventually means that we will be able to write our own programs to be verified by zero-knowledge proofs, opening up a huge amount of possibilities for new products and features without having to rely on StarkWare’s engineers to write the code themselves.

Asset prices on dYdX come from decentralized on-chain oracles such as Chainlink or MakerDAO, and are used to determine the collateralization of your account. These prices are fed to the dYdX smart contracts through price oracles that run on Ethereum.

Prices are attested-to by oracles using STARK-compatible signatures, allowing prices to be used as soon as they are signed, rather than waiting for a transaction to be mined. This significantly increases the economic security of the system against flash crashes, and allows for real-time liquidations.

To use the system, a trader first registers a Stark Key to their Ethereum Address in the StarkEx Contract. The StarkEx Contract contains a mapping from Ethereum addresses to Stark Keys, which is used as the off-chain identifier. This promises that if Alice withdraws money from an off-chain vault with a key that belongs to her, only she can actually control these funds on Layer 1. In addition, the on-chain contract handles registering, depositing and withdrawing USDC from/to the system, and also contains the commitment to the full balance state of the system, found in Layer 2.

The off-chain logic handles trades, liquidations, transfers and deleverages, as well as updating the oracle prices. It stores the entire balance of all the users, and periodically submit STARK proofs, attesting the validity of the balances change, given the user’s transactions.

dYdX monitors the relevant Layer 1 transactions - namely deposits, force withdrawals, and force trades. Upon receiving such transactions on Layer 1, the relevant operation (e.g., adding funds to the user’s Layer 2 position, for example) will take place in Layer 2.

After a batch of transactions is executed off-chain, the proof to its validity is generated and verified by a STARK verifier on-chain. After the STARK verifier approves the state transitions, it takes effect, including changing Layer 1 balances of users due to deposits to or withdrawal from Layer 2.

At first, no. However, as more Layer 2 Rollups emerge we recognize the importance of supporting interoperability, so this may appear on StarkWare’s roadmap.

If adoption becomes fragmented across a number of different Rollups in addition to liquidity on Layer 1 vs Layer 2, Ethereum's base layer is likely to lose some of the composability. However, it is likely that in the medium-term, new solutions will emerge to enhance composability.

In order to guarantee self custody of the funds, at any point in time, a user may opt to perform a forced request. Forced requests are initiated by a Layer 1 transaction, to avoid censorship. In case that the request is not served within a limited time frame, the user is able to freeze the StarkEx contract (and thus the exchange) and withdraw directly from the frozen contract. There are two forced actions: forcedWithdrawal andforcedTrade.

When a forcedWithdrawal request is submitted, the StarkEx Contract either withdraws funds for you, or proves that the request is illegitimate (e.g. a user requests to withdraw more money than their off-chain position.) If StarkEx fails to withdraw funds within a limited timeframe, a user can call to the freeze function - effectively preventing the StarkEx contract from changing its state, and enabling an “escape mode”, in which users can exit with USDC based on the total value of their position in the last accepted on-chain batch.

When a forcedTrade request is submitted, two users trade between them a certain amount of some synthetic against another amount of collateral, to submit these amounts on-chain. Either the system performs the trade (or proves its invalidity), or the users get the ability to freeze the on-chain StarkEx Contract, and retrieve their funds.

If you lose your Stark Key, you can’t perform any trades, transfer, or withdrawal on Layer 2 until you regenerate a new one using your wallet, since these actions are all protected by signing with your Stark Key. However, you can still submit the relevant forcedWithdrawal andforcedTrade requests on-chain, using your Ethereum key. The recommended flow is to make forced trade requests with users in order to close your position, then withdraw all your collateral with forced withdrawal. Alternatively, if you wish to remain on Layer 2, you can register a newly generated, public Stark Key to the system, retrieve apositionId from dYdX, and perform forcedTrade transactions on Layer 1 between your old and new positions (while maintaining the same collateralization ratios).

The insurance fund will not be decentralized at launch, and the dYdX team will be directly responsible for deposits & withdrawals to and from the fund. In the future, we may decentralize some aspects of the fund; however, initially, our priority is to ensure that underwater accounts are dealt with in a timely manner.

We take the security of our smart contracts extremely seriously. We’ve conducted rigorous internal testing and contracted independent top security firm PeckShield to perform a thorough audit of our smart contracts. Our audit will be open-source, and verifiable by anyone. Further, our track record speaks for itself: since launching our first product in October of 2018, dYdX is one of the only major DeFi protocols that has yet to receive a bug report of user funds being at-risk. No users have ever lost funds on dYdX.

dYdX has been building a business model around the exchange. We introduced maker taker trading fees in March 2020. Our goals have been to earn consistent revenue as a company, and to incentivize traders to provide more liquidity to our protocol.

After our Layer 2 launch, we will focus on decentralizing more parts of our technology stack and handing over more control to our users. This will be a gradual process that could ultimately result in a DAO to govern the community. We are taking a careful look at different design tradeoffs.

Perpetuals will be the focus for dYdX given the strong market interest from both retail and institutional users in DeFi. Perpetuals offer cost-efficient trading with leverage, and dYdX’s model allows it to offer a seamless trading experience across many perpetuals. dYdX will continue to support Spot and Margin trading, but these products may also be phased out.

While DEXs have become increasingly popular for spot products, we expect DEXs to become just as popular for margin and perpetual markets in the coming years. This is largely due to the fact that decentralized margin and perpetuals are newer and take time for users to adopt. Further, we think DEXs will continue to gain market share in relation to centralized exchanges, due to lower frictions to onboard, better UI/UX, increased security guarantees, and more attractive products to trade. dYdX combines the security and transparency of a DEX, with the speed and usability of a CEX. We think DeFi will supersede traditional finance technology only if the user experience & design are exceptional.