dYdX Surge Is Live: $20M Trading Competition

dYdX
dYdX Surge Is Live: $20M Trading Competition

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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Legitimacy and Disclaimer

Crypto-assets can be highly volatile and trading crypto-assets involves risk of loss, particularly when using leverage. Investment into crypto-assets may not be regulated and may not be adequate for retail investors. Do your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets.

dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to U.S. persons as well as in other restricted jurisdictions. The dYdX Foundation does not operate or participate in the operation of any component of the dYdX Chain’s infrastructure.

The dYdX Foundation’s purpose is to support the current implementation and any future implementations of the dYdX protocol and to foster community-driven growth in the dYdX ecosystem.

The dYdX Chain software is open-source software to be used or implemented by any party in accordance with the applicable license. At no time should the dYdX Chain and/or its software or related components be deemed to be a product or service provided or made available in any way by the dYdX Foundation. Interactions with the dYdX Chain software or any implementation thereof are permissionless and disintermediated, subject to the terms of the applicable licenses and code. Users who interact with the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations thereof) will not be interacting with the dYdX Foundation in any way whatsoever. The dYdX Foundation does not make any representations, warranties or covenants in connection with the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations and/or components thereof), including (without limitation) with regard to their technical properties or performance, as well as their actual or potential usefulness or suitability for any particular purpose, and users agree to rely on the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations and/or components thereof) “AS IS, WHERE IS”.

Nothing in this post should be used or considered as legal, financial, tax, or any other advice, nor as an instruction or invitation to act by anyone.  Users should conduct their own research and due diligence before making any decisions. The dYdX Foundation may alter or update any information in this post in the future at its sole discretion and assumes no obligation to publicly disclose any such change. This post is solely based on the information available to the dYdX Foundation at the time it was published and should only be read and taken into consideration at the time it was published and on the basis of the circumstances that surrounded it. The dYdX Foundation makes no guarantees of future performance and is under no obligation to undertake any of the activities contemplated herein.

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dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to U.S. persons as well as in other restricted jurisdictions. The dYdX Foundation does not operate or participate in the operation of any component of the dYdX Chain's infrastructure.

Nothing in this website 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. You should perform your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets due to high volatility and risks of loss.

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The dYdX Foundation does not operate or has control over the MegaVault and has not been involved in the development, deployment and operation of  any component of the dYdX Unlimited software (including the MegaVault).

Crypto-assets can be highly volatile and trading crypto-assets involves risk of loss, particularly when using leverage. Investment into crypto-assets may not be regulated and may not be adequate for retail investors. Do your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets.

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