How to Buy DYDX

Start trading crypto

Wealthsimple is the smart way to invest and save. Do more with your money with our smart financial tools and expert advice.

You can buy DYDX the same way you would purchase most cryptocurrencies: through a crypto exchange or a trading platform that’s connected to an exchange. There are many options to pick from—each with different fees and different token listings and different locations that they operate in — but it probably comes as little surprise that our favorite is Wealthsimple. Our crypto platform is the first to be regulated in Canada.

Buy and Sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, and dozens more cryptocurrencies with Wealthsimple. Sign up and Trade here.

What DYDX Is

DYDX is the coin that is at the center of dYdX, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. The exchange specializes in advanced forms of crypto trading, including what are called “perpetual contracts” — a unique form of futures contracts that, unlike regular futures contracts, do not expire.

Like a lot of decentralized finance platforms, the exchange prides itself on removing middlemen, and so dYdX has no centralized authority. (It doesn’t even require users to provide an ID to use the service beyond their email address and a promise that they aren’t a U.S. citizen.) Everything on the exchange is automated. For instance, dYdX automatically matches users with lenders and borrowers. And when demand for a token changes, it automatically updates interest rates.

To be clear, DYDX trading doesn’t happen on the dYdX exchange; investors trade other kinds of crypto coins there. Instead, DYDX is a governance token that helps with running the platform. But we should also point out that holding certain amounts of the DYDX token will reduce the fees that the platform charges for trades.

What Else DYDX Holders Can Do

Since DYDX is a governance token, it allows those who hold it to propose changes to dYdX and what the platform offers — things like the types of trades people can conduct or how the network distributes funds from its community treasury. Only people with a certain amount of DYDX can bring a proposal up to a vote, and only people with DYDX can vote on those proposals.

You can also simply buy and sell DYDX crypto as a form of speculation. Just know that DYDX price prediction can be tricky, if not impossible, in the volatile crypto market.

What Else dYdX Users Can Do

In January 2022, dYdX introduced Trading Leagues: a competition between traders that offers up to $350,000 a week in prizes. Traders within several tiers — bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond — are ranked based on their trading portfolio’s worth at the end of each weekly cycle. The top performers in all but the lowest tier (bronze) win from the cash prize pool, and some get promoted to the next highest tier, all the way up to the pinnacle tier (diamond). The worst performers in the higher tiers get demoted to the tier below.

The weekly winners of the Trading Leagues tiers may also be rewarded with a Hedgie: a collectible, one-of-a-kind NFT avatar of a hedgehog that also comes with a discount on trading fees. The top trader on dYdX each day also receives one — and that discount.

People can also participate in dYdX staking by putting USDC — a stablecoin that is designed to continuously keep the same value as the U.S. dollar — into either the exchange’s liquidity pool or its safety pool.

Frequently Asked Questions

dYdX is a decentralized crypto exchange. To sign up, users do not need to provide any form of identification beyond an email address and a promise that they are not a U.S. citizen. (Canadians are welcome.) Users will also need a crypto wallet that is compatible with the Ethereum blockchain, since dYdX is built on it. Connect that wallet to the exchange, and you can make many different kinds of trades with certain coins within the dYdX portfolio.

You’re gonna have to answer that one for yourself. The crypto market—including DYDX— is extremely volatile, with prices quickly changing, in sometimes unpredictable ways. Many people consider crypto the riskiest part of their portfolio—meaning that it can lead to both big rewards and big losses.

One billion DYDX coins have been minted, but not all of them have been distributed. They are being systematically circulated over a five-year period, which began on August 3, 2021. Some are given to users as rewards for trading, or for putting funds into the exchange’s liquidity and safety pools.

As of October 2021, about 5,000 to 10,000 people used dYdX per week, according to Bloomberg. Those users tend to be people with significant investments in crypto. Despite having a user base thousands of times smaller than some of its competitors, dYdX has on some days seen even greater trading volume than those larger platforms.

No, you cannot mine DYDX. All 1,000,000,000 DYDX — the maximum amount allowed by the dYdX protocol — have been minted.

Last Updated June 14, 2022

Buy & sell crypto instantly

Start trading
Spinning Wealthsimple coin

Buy & sell crypto instantly