dYdX Ethereum Perpetual Contract

After listening to our active trading community and evaluating the greater DeFi product landscape, we are pleased to announce that we have launched an ETH-USD Inverse Perpetual Contract Market.

To celebrate the launch, we are providing 50% off trading fees on the ETH-USD Perpetual for the next 7 days.

Now, dYdX traders can trade ETH with increased leverage (up to 10x), while using ETH as collateral. Similarly to our BTC Perpetual, ETH-USD will have no expiry. Our contracts have been audited by Open Zeppelin and can be viewed here.

Perpetual Markets on dYdX are not available in the United States. No actual Fiat USD is supported on dYdX.

Why an Inverse Perpetual?

An inverse perpetual contract is one that is quoted in USD but margined and settled in the base asset -- in this case ETH. The benefit of this type of contract is that users do not have to take on any stablecoin exposure, and can use ETH that they likely already hold to trade with. Traders can now obtain leveraged long or short exposure to ETH while using ETH as collateral and earning returns in ETH.

Why ETH?

While ETH is the underpinning of the DeFi ecosystem, there are currently only a few simple ways to gain ETH leverage in both an efficient and decentralized manner. With our Perpetual, users can ensure that they remain in control of their ETH while gaining increased leverage and trading on the most liquid orderbooks in DeFi.

Contract Specification

Details for the ETH–USD perpetual market are provided below. The market otherwise operates identically to the BTC–USD perpetual. General information and examples can be found in the Perpetual Guide. Details on the protocol and decentralization can be found here.

Perpetual type: Inverse
Underlying market: ETH–USD
Margin/settlement asset: ETH
Tick size: $0.10 USD
Min order size: $200 USD. Order sizes below $1,500 must be either market orders or fill-or-kill orders
Quantity step: $1 USD
Max order size: None
Max position size: None
Expiry: Perpetual (no expiration)
Maximum leverage: 10x
Initial margin requirement: 10%
Maintenance margin requirement: 7.5%
Fees: -0.025% Maker, 0.075% Taker
Custom fees for “small” orders: 1% Taker
Min order size to avoid “small” order fees: $1500 USD
Mark price for liquidations: The mark price is the on-chain index price, given by the MakerDAO ETH–USD Oracle V2 which reports the median spot price of six exchanges: Binance, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase Pro, Gemini, and Kraken.
Funding: Funding payments are made every second according to a rate which is updated hourly. The funding premium is scaled so as to have a realization period of 8 hours.
Contract loss mechanism: Deleveraging (centralized, but verifiable insurance fund is the first backstop before deleveraging)
Trading hours: 24/7/365

What’s next?

We are working on launching more perpetuals in the future, with the goal of making dYdX the go-to platform for trading a variety of cryptoassets across Spot, Margin, and Perpetuals.

If you’d like to get started with trading on our platform or have any other questions, please join our Discord and follow us on Twitter.

Trade the perpetual now →