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The dYdX community and Chaos Labs have officially launched the dYdX Surge Program, a nine-month trading competition designed to reward active participation and accelerate trading activity on dYdX.
With up to $20 million in DYDX allocated to the program, Surge is one of the most ambitious and sustained incentive initiatives in DeFi to date. Whether you’re new to dYdX or returning from a previous version of the protocol, Surge is designed to make every trade more rewarding.
Surge To The Top - Monthly Trading Competitions Until December 2025
The Surge Rewards Program distributes incentives over nine monthly “seasons”, with rewards tied to a transparent public leaderboard powered by Chaos Labs. Every taker trade earns points that contribute to your position on the leaderboard, where higher rankings translate to larger DYDX rewards, distributed at the end of each season.
Unlike other trading competitions that focus solely on P&L or trading volume, dYdX Surge is designed to reward deeper engagement across three key areas of the dYdX ecosystem:
- General (50%): Rewards based on trading fees paid by takers.
- Retail (25%): Reserved for taker activity through the official web and mobile interfaces.
- Activation (25%): Designed to boost participation in newly launched features, support key market activity, reward stakers, and re-engage historical users.
This structure ensures rewards are capital-efficient, user-focused, and accessible to a wide range of traders.
How To Earn Surge Rewards
dYdX Surge is fully permissionless, there’s no need to sign up or manually claim rewards. All eligible trading activity on dYdX automatically generates reward points and a leaderboard ranking. Rewards are distributed at the end of each season.
Traders can boost their leaderboard rank, and their potential DYDX rewards, through a variety of actions:
- Execute taker trades on the dYdX Chain
- Use the web or mobile trading interfaces
- Stake DYDX to a dYdX validator
- Trade in boosted markets, which will be announced throughout the program
- Reactivate a wallet that previously used dYdX v3 or early v4
These additional actions reflect the community’s focus on rewarding loyalty, platform usage, and sustainable growth. Surge is designed not just to reward high-volume traders, but to create an experience that feels closer to a competitive league, where strategy, timing, and participation all matter.
Turning Fees Into Rewards
While centralized exchanges take significant fees on every trade, dYdX does things differently. With lower fees and a community-owned protocol, Surge transforms trading fees into DYDX rewards, giving traders a share of the value they help create.
In 2024, dYdX recorded over $270 billion in trading volume across 150+ markets. With more than 58,000 DYDX token holders, a fully decentralized infrastructure, and a rapidly evolving product across web and mobile, dYdX is committed to delivering the best trading experience in DeFi, without compromising on ownership or transparency.
Built By The Community, For The Community
Like all incentive programs on dYdX, Surge is community-governed. Monthly reward allocations, changes to eligibility, and new feature boosts will continue to be proposed and approved by the community. The program itself was born out of governance Proposal 236, which passed with overwhelming support.
Surge represents a major step forward in trader-aligned growth. As the program unfolds over the next nine months, we look forward to seeing how the community competes, adapts, and earns.
🔗 Ready to compete? Click the “Get Started” button above
📊 Track the leaderboard via Chaos Labs
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