One of the most popular decentralized exchanges, dYdX, has reached a significant milestone in its development as the overall trading volume on a 24-hour period surpassed that of the largest US-based centralized exchange – Coinbase.
Built on the Ethereum blockchain, dYdX is a DEX supporting perpetual, margin, and spot trading, as well as lending and borrowing. Although it was launched a few years back, its trading volumes have spiked since the middle of 2021. CoinGecko data shows that the platform had a trading volume of around $25 million in April and May this year.
It started to rapidly pick up in the following few months and has culminated in the past 24 hours. Further information from the data aggregator shows that the daily trading volume has surged to $6.5 billion in this time frame.
Just for reference, the largest US centralized exchange – Coinbase – had a little over $3 billion. CryptoCom and Huobi are also behind dYdX, while only Binance has higher numbers with roughly $23 billion.
Antonio Juliano, dYdX’s founder and former Coinbase employee, outlined the milestone on his Twitter account.
It’s worth noting that dYdX’s native token (DYDX), which saw the light of day weeks ago following an air-drop, has also gone up in terms of its USD value. Similarly to most DeFi-related tokens today, DYDX has surged by 30% to $22, and it even charted a new all-time high a few hours ago.
The most discussed theory among the crypto community behind this sudden surge of trading volume and prices is related to China. As reported late last week, the world’s most populated nation went after the crypto industry again and banned all trading activities inside its borders.
This move already has its consequences on some centralized exchanges, as Huobi – arguably the most utilized one in China – said it will stop accepting new Chinese users.
Shortly after, Colin Wu, the popular Chinese blockchain journalist, indicated that all local communities “are discussing how to learn DeFi” and predicted that they will “flood” into the decentralized finance world.
Nevertheless, Wu also said most of the transaction volume on dYdX was caused by farming, “rather than just demand.” As such, he reminded that the epoch1 of dYdX transaction mining will end in the following several hours. When epoch0 ended on August 31st, the 24-hour transaction volume dropped by 90%, he concluded.