The dYdX community has officially launched the Surge Rewards Program, a nine-month trading competition designed to reward active participation from both new and returning users. Beginning April 1, 2025, the program will allocate up to $20 million in DYDX tokens to traders over the course of nine monthly “seasons,” establishing one of the largest and longest-running incentive programs in DeFi trading to date.
Surge Rewards are distributed across three distinct categories to engage a broad range of users:
- General (50%) – Based on trading fees paid by takers, maximizing capital-efficient rewards.
- Retail (25%) – Reserved for taker activity through the dYdX web and mobile interfaces.
- Activation (25%) – Designed to boost usage of new features, reward staking DYDX, increase liquidity on new key markets, and to re-engage historical users.
This structure ensures that Surge not only rewards volume, but also encourages deeper engagement with the dYdX ecosystem and its user-centric products.
Making Every Trade a Win: Competing For More Rewards
Surge is more than a monthly incentive reward distribution, it’s a fundamental shift in how traders interact with exchanges. Every taker trade on dYdX earns points, contributing to a public leaderboard that determines DYDX token rewards distributed at the end of each month. In addition to points earned through fees paid, traders can increase their points by:
- Executing trades via the official web and mobile interfaces
- Returning users from dYdX v3
- Reactivating wallets from early v4
- Trading in boosted markets, which will be announced periodically
- Staking DYDX to a dYdX validator
By combining consistent incentives with gamified elements like boosted markets and the monthly leaderboard, the Surge Program delivers an experience that feels closer to a competitive trading league than a passive reward drop. The leaderboard provided by Chaos Labs offers full transparency into reward points and trader rankings.
Rewarding Loyalty: Boosts for Returning Users
Special activation rewards have been earmarked for traders who previously used dYdX v3 and early dYdX v4 users. These cohorts will receive additional multipliers when they return and engage with the protocol during the Surge seasons, an important step in maintaining long-term user alignment as the dYdX ecosystem scales.
Turning Fees Into Rewards: DeFi Beats CeFi
While centralized exchanges take significant fees on every trade, dYdX charges lower fees and rewards traders with DYDX tokens each time a trade is made. With the launch of the Surge Program, total rewards have been significantly increased, unlocking a higher level of earning potential for active traders.
In 2024, dYdX recorded over $270B in trading volume on over 150 markets, reaffirming its leadership in the decentralized derivatives space. With more than 58,000 DYDX token holders and a rapidly maturing product across web and mobile, dYdX is committed to delivering performance that surpasses centralized exchanges, while preserving the freedom and transparency of DeFi.
A Community-Led Path to Incentive Innovation
As with all dYdX initiatives, the Surge Rewards Program is governed by the community. Season-by-season reward allocations, trader eligibility criteria, and program enhancements will continue to be refined through DAO proposals and on-chain governance.
Surge represents the latest step in dYdX’s commitment to building a decentralized, trader-aligned future, one where protocol success directly benefits the people powering its growth. For more information, visit the official website.
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