Overview

Partner Revenue Share directly incentivizes trading bots, terminals, front-ends, and other third-party services to direct order flow to dYdX and earn a percentage of the trading fees their users generate. This marks a new milestone as a major decentralized exchange introduces the potential for governance approved revenue sharing for perpetuals built directly into the protocol. 

Why It Matters

On most exchanges, revenue sharing is opaque and discretionary. dYdX takes a different approach by making revenue sharing transparent, onchain, and built for sustainable growth. With the Partner Revenue Share:

• Partners win: A clear path to monetization for routing flow.
• Traders win: Access to dYdX through more third-party tools.
• The protocol wins: Benefits from broader distribution, more volume, and stronger alignment with ecosystem partners.

This program makes dYdX one of the few decentralized platforms offering the potential for an onchain revshare mechanism for perpetuals. It allows partners to capture value directly from the trading activities they generate, creating a sustainable framework where growth is driven by governance and protocol design, and incentives remain aligned with the dYdX community.

Partner Revenue Share builds on the recent release of Builder Codes (blog post here). 

• Builder codes - Give developers a permissionless way to monetize onchain order flow on dYdX by attaching a payout address and a fee on top of dYdX fees to orders. When the order is filled, the builder automatically earns that fee. 
• Partner Revenue Share - Designed for longer-term, governance-approved collaborations with key partners. This program automatically directs a portion of trading fees that otherwise would have been earned by dYdX to the partner in the block after each trade is filled. This reduces the share of trading fees retained by dYdX in a given trade. 

Together, they offer flexible paths for both independent builders and major partners to contribute to dYdX’s growth.

How it Works 

Step 1: Governance Approval

To get started, partners first need approval from the governance community. Partners may submit proposals to the dYdX community on the forums (https://dydx.forum/) and onchain. Proposals should follow the Proposal Lifecycle and in addition to the proposal template should specify the respective: 

• Onchain payout address
• The % fees they’d like to receive (subject to governance limits). 

Once a proposal passes, the partner’s address and revenue share are officially registered onchain. Future updates (like changing percentages) or removals (setting share to 0) follow the same governance workflow.

Step 2: Attach Your revshareCode

Revenue shares are automatically calculated and distributed onchain. Approved partners receive ongoing payouts as long as they continue to route order flow.

• Affiliate priority: Before fees are distributed, the system checks if the trader’s account has already been referred by an affiliate. If so, the affiliate program takes priority. If not, the partner’s share is calculated based on whether the trade was a maker or taker order.
  
  • Example Scenario:
    
    • Trade size: $50,000
    • dYdX Taker Fee: 5 bps (0.05%)
    • Affiliate Share: 15% of protocol fees
    • Partner Share: 20% of protocol fees
  • Protocol Fee is 50,000 × 0.05% = $25
    
    • Case A: Trader was referred by an affiliate (25% of protocol fee)
      
      • $25 × 15% = $3.75 USD fees to affiliate
      • $25 - $3.75 = $21.25 remaining fees sent to protocol
    • Case B: Trader referred via partner (partner share 20%)
      
      • $25 × 20% = $5 USD fees to partner
      • $25 - $5 = $20 remaining fees sent to protocol
• Automatic Payouts: Once calculated, the partner’s portion is automatically sent to their payout address, and the remaining fees flow through the usual protocol revenue channels.

There’s no cap on earnings and every payment is recorded and verifiable onchain.

Monitoring & Transparency 

Partners can track everything through the indexer:

• /orders shows which order router address was used
• /fills shows the exact revenue distributed per trade

This ensures every revenue share split is fully verifiable.

Community Guardrails 

The governance community can also cut off bad actors. If a partner is found to be fraudulent or harmful, governance can simply set their share to 0. This ensures the program stays fair while remaining open to all credible partners.

Next Steps

Support for Partner Revenue Share is live. Prospective revenue share partners are now able to put proposals forward for the dYdX community to consider. Over time, Partner Revenue Share  could help dYdX expand into new channels, reach more traders globally, and further decentralize its growth engine.

Prospective partners may reach out to ecosystem@intl.dydx.exchange for help with integrating the revshareCode into your order flow and to understand how the feature works.

Read the full documentation here: https://docs.dydx.xyz/interaction/integration/integration-revshare

Disclaimer 

dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to other restricted persons. All use of dYdX software is subject to the dYdX Software Terms of Use. 

This post describes anticipated features in the open source dYdX software. The implementation of these features in any live deployment of dYdX software will be decided by the relevant deployer community. dYdX International Ltd. (“DI”), dYdX Trading Inc. dba dYdX Labs (“dYdX Labs”) and their affiliates do not develop, control or operate any component of dYdX software for public use. The information provided in this website is for general informational purposes only and DI reserves the right to update, modify, or amend any contents herein, at its sole discretion and without prior notice. Nothing herein should be used or considered as legal, financial, tax, or any other advice, nor as an instruction or invitation to act in any way by anyone. 

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