Our mission at dYdX is to democratize access to financial opportunity by building a best in class product experience for DeFi. Building our open-source software, dYdX Chain, was an important step in achieving this goal, but there is much more to improve! On that note, we are excited to share an updated product roadmap for 2024 that will continue to drive innovation in DeFi.
This year, the team at dYdX will focus on three primary areas: Permissionless Markets, Core Trading Improvements, and UX/Onboarding Upgrades. You can read more about these topics below and we plan to share more in-depth details as we get closer to shipping these improvements.
Please note that dYdX is a privately held company, and all projects described in this blog post are currently being researched. Nothing herein is intended to or should be construed as a promise to perform, and is subject to change at the sole discretion of dYdX. This blog post is merely intended to provide information about the open-source software that we are developing, which can be adopted by any governance community.
Permissionless Markets
One of dYdX’s major goals is to create the building blocks for traders to be able to list and trade any market, instantly, without going through any applicable governance processes. Currently, all new market listings must go through governance, which can take days or weeks to complete end to end, and require participation by many different parties. Permissionless Markets aim to remove the friction of that process entirely, and create a streamlined way for any trader to instantly create a new market in a manner that aligns incentives across both the protocol and traders.
We envision software that allows a perpetual market to be created with the click of a button as long as there is an oracle price for any asset anywhere on the internet. Additionally, we aim to create the building blocks for there to be sufficient liquidity as soon as a market is created. The end state of “Permissionless Markets” should result in dYdX software having:
- Instant + permissionless market listings functionality to enable anyone to list any market
- Instant liquidity via LP Vaults to provide sufficient liquidity on all markets
- Expanded oracles to enable perpetuals on any asset
- Cross-margin and isolated-margin at the protocol layer for enhanced risk controls
We believe that Permissionless Markets will ultimately increase the amount of available markets on protocols using dYdX software by orders of magnitudes, and that the dYdX Chain software will enable the go-to exchange to trade any market, at any time.
Core Trading Improvements
The dYdX Chain software enables a trading experience that parallels centralized exchanges’, while allowing traders to maintain full custody of their trading funds on-chain. The chain utilizes a fully decentralized, off-chain orderbook and matching engine that can be secured by a diverse set of validators. The novel architecture of dYdX Chain continues to pave the way for DeFi.
In the first half of 2024, our focus will be on improving the following aspects of core trading software:
- Improving the reliability and infrastructure of the exchange software
- Adding trading features to help traders execute trades quickly and accurately
- Adding support for additional clients in languages such as C++, Rust, and Go
To build on top of our progress thus far, we aim to enhance the overall efficiency of dYdX Chain and decrease latency. By addressing any potential bottlenecks and optimizing the system's performance, we plan to minimize delays and provide traders with a seamless, reliable experience on dYdX Chain.This will also be coupled with new product features that enhance the trading experience and improve risk management such as new order types, chart improvements, single click functionality, isolated positions, and much more!
Furthermore, the team is also working on developing and outsourcing trading clients in C++, Rust, and Go. These languages were chosen based on their popularity and widespread adoption within the developer community.
UX/Onboarding Upgrades
Onboarding and other trader experiences that support trading are essential to the overall product experience using dYdX software. We not only aim to deliver best in class trading software, but also make sure that traders feel that the entire experience around the product adequately welcomes and supports traders of all types.
To that end, our goals for the software center around:
- Making onboarding easier by increasing the number of onramp options and creating more ways to connect
- Improving exchange usability through better presentation and alerting of important information
- Integrating social elements into the exchange software
Today, traders can only onboard by connecting an EVM wallet, deriving a dYdX Chain wallet, and then transferring in and depositing funds. This process can be time consuming and costly which is not ideal for traders. We plan to improve the onboarding experience and increase our connection points by integrating CEX onboarding, so that traders can seamlessly bring their crypto from CEXs with lower fees and onboarding time (Coinbase USDC onboarding is already live!). New wallets will also be supported, such as OKX wallets.
Trading in the crypto space is very social, whether it’s following crypto influencers on X or participating in discussions with other traders in Discord. Therefore, we want to make traders feel less isolated. By integrating social logins, traders will be able to go from tweeting on X to trading using dYdX software seamlessly. We also plan to utilize the transparency of blockchain in order to create trading profiles for each dYdX Chain address. Traders will be able to access trading profiles via a leaderboard or by searching for a trader’s dYdX Chain address, and view open positions, trading history, etc. This will be particularly useful for traders interested in competing with other traders or just following certain wallets.
Finally, exchange software usability will be enhanced with the introduction of a global search functionality and shortcuts. There will also be improved alerting and notifications, starting with email notifications.
About dYdX
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