On February 18th, the dYdX Foundation hosted a discussion on Discord regarding general updates, current governance proposals and an Epoch 6 review. The discussion was followed by a community hangout and AMA with the dYdX Trading team.

A redacted transcript is available below:

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks for tuning in guys. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're coming from. This is our AMA and Epoch 6 review. We are excited to keep up these AMAs. As Antonio tweeted out this week and mentioned in the Discord, the aim is for all of us to become more transparent and open with our thoughts about all things dYdX. So, let's just start with a few housekeeping rules again. Please keep the questions posted in Discord. I'll try and monitor it in real-time and post some questions for the team to answer. After the Epoch review, and when we open up the stage for the AMA, just please raise your hand up and then we'll invite you up. If you are invited up, please just refrain from any price discussion. Doing so will result in you getting kicked from the stage and banned from the Discord.

Again, I hate to have to repeat this, but there are new people joining here, so please listen to existing questions before you post yours and assure it hasn't already been asked. When you're on stage, please only ask one question. It will give other members of the community the chance to offer their thoughts and questions. So finally, please stay on topic. Off-topic discussions not related to dYdX or the dYdX Foundation will be moderated.

So here today from the dYdX Foundation team are me and David. Also, we have Carl (Cbergz) from the Grants team. From the Trading team we have our routine speakers, Corey, and Marc. StarkWhale’s recently just joined us as a community manager, so congratulations, and he's on the stage with us as well.

So, to start with, David's going to be spending some time going through all things Epoch 6. Carl from the Grants team will speak about the Grants Program and the recent developments, and the Trading team will give a high-level overview of all things happening at dYdX, and then we'll answer some pre-populated questions from the Discord. We will finish off with an open platform for any questions. So, let's start with David, over to you.

David (dYdX Foundation): Thanks James. We have a smaller audience today. Assuming a lot of people are at ETHDenver and/or involved with other activities. Given the size of the audience, we can make this a lot more intimate and, again, encourage everyone who is here today to ask questions. We can bring you on stage, and let's try to make this as conversational as possible.

So, like prior Epoch reviews, I'm going to spend the first 10 minutes or so just walking through Epoch 6 highlights, providing KPIs and developments over the last 28 days. So, as you all know, Epoch 6 ended earlier this week. Total volume on the protocol in Epoch 6 was about $73 billion with average daily volume at about $2.7 billion, and ending open interest increased to $940 million, and TVL increased slightly to $960 million. So overall, continuing to see pretty strong volume metrics across the board, even though volumes overall have declined in the market.

In terms of rewards, we saw almost 7,000 unique wallets earning 5.8 million $DYDX through trading liquidity provider and staking rewards over the last Epoch. Through Epoch 6, we've now had 45,000 unique wallets, unique wallets earn $DYDX through all of the rewards programs. So, there is a pretty substantial distribution to various players in the ecosystem. Currently, there's about 20,000 unique wallets that currently hold $DYDX, and about 2,200 unique wallets that currently hold $stkDYDX.

One trend that we have noticed is an increase in held $stkDYDX, since a recent governance proposal incentivized holding $stkDYDX as an input to earning trading rewards and liquidity provider rewards. We've seen the number of unique wallets holding $stkDYDX increase pretty significantly. There's about 30% or so of circulating $DYDX supply, which is now staked to the safety model, which generally we find encouraging and shows that a lot of our holders are long-term holders and participating not only in earning $DYDX, but also staking that $DYDX in the safety module and backstopping the overall protocol.

In terms of the LP rewards, 17 addresses were eligible for LP rewards in Epoch 6 with the majority earned by two market makers. This is a continuation of the trend that we've seen over the last few Epochs. Even though we've seen competition in the pool increase, with new market makers and liquidity providers competing for these LP rewards, there is still a large concentration on these rewards. The dYdX community voted strongly in favor of reducing the LP rewards volume threshold for market makers from 1% to 0.25%, and so any market maker or liquidity provider that reached that 0.25% threshold in Epoch 6, can start earning rewards in Epoch 7. As a result of that change, we now have 37 addresses, 17 existing and 20 new market makers that are now competing for LP rewards and are eligible for those rewards in Epoch 7. Hopefully we start to see more competition in terms of the distribution here, certainly from an access standpoint, it's great to see more market makers get involved and have access to that pool. We're excited to see how those trends play out and if other governance proposals are submitted to make the pools more competitive, more broadly.

In terms of the liquidity staking pool. So, there was $350 million $USDC staked from 737 users. 5 market makers have borrowed $USDC from that pool. At the start of Epoch 7, that pool could decline further to $191 million. Over time, we've seen the amount staked continually decline. I think from our standpoint, that's okay. Ultimately, close to $200 million of capital available to market makers to provide liquidity on dYdX is still a huge amount. We're excited by some recent developments and tooling around the community voting on the borrowing framework to allow the existing market makers and new market makers to be able to fully utilize that capital and drive greater liquidity on the platform.

In terms of the safety module at the end of the Epoch, there was again, 25 million $DYDX staked. That number has continued to increase, which I think is great. So far there's about 2,200 users that are staking, and I think we expect that number to continue to increase.

In terms of the circulating supply. At the end of Epoch 6, 8.99% of the total $DYDX supply, which is considered liquid, and this excludes unearned retroactive rewards that were transferred to the treasury and then the $DYDX vested in the community treasury. So, as more rewards vest to the community treasury, there's an additional amount that the community can vote to allocate, which ultimately would then be baked into the fully diluted circulating supply.

In terms of governance, we've been encouraged by all of the activity in the forums. There were two major governance proposals and votes that passed over the course of Epoch 6.

First, the dYdX community unanimously supported implementing the borrowing framework that was put forward by the dYdX Foundation to onboard LPs, to enable them to borrow $USDC staked to the liquidity staking pool for market making purposes. Over a million $DYDX or $stkDYDX and 268 voters in favor of that proposal. Now the fate of adding new market makers to that pool is really in the hands of the community and an on-chain vote is required to add new market makers to that pool. So, hopefully we see community members drive that process of the course of this Epoch and/or next.

Second, the dYdX community strongly supported the proposal to reduce the threshold to receive LP rewards from 1% to 0.25%. Again, we saw really strong community support where 27 million $DYDX and 99.8% of votes voted in favor of reducing the threshold.

Overall, we've seen really strong community discussion in votes and encourage the community to continue to drive governance proposals that help benefit the protocol overall.

On the dYdX Grants Program, two rounds of grant approvals were relesed for a total of $768,000 worth of $DYDX in pledged funding. In total 17 grants have been approved so far. Cbergz (dYdX Grants) will provide some updates here a little later. Overall, it's great to see a lot of applicants to the Grants Program and for the RFP list to be extended. So, I think that's a positive development overall.

The dYdX Foundation posted an open call for Endorsed Delegates to kickstart the delegation program before a treasury funded solution is developed. That post is on Commonwealth. The post is a call to action for interested parties who want to become delegates to post more information on their public profile. This allows others who are interested in delegating their tokens to get a better sense of your background. That program just kicked off about a week ago, we're looking for Endorsed Delegates to go through the docs. If you are interested, always happy to chat more, but it's something that we're excited about launching and seeing how that goes.

In terms of other announcements, dYdX Trading announced the Hedgies NFT. In total 2,443 Hedgies were included in the initial distribution that were distributed first to users who voted on an on-chain proposal. The second round was for active traders from Epoch 5. The third distribution round was for the general public. The remainder of the collection of 4,200 Hedgies will be distributed by dYdX Trading as rewards for top performers trading in Trading Leagues. We're trying to incentivize traders to use the product and reward our most active voters and community members and traders with the initial distribution. As part of that, the dYdX Foundation also purchased 205 Hedgies to promote the growth of the dYdX protocol and governance. We've posted a thread on Commonwealth with a list of actions that may result in community members being rewarded with Hedgies. We're trying to be transparent around our decision making, but ultimately the goal here is to drive growth in the protocol and drive good governance among our community members. So, if anyone in the audience has any ideas on how to distribute those Hedgies to the community, I encourage you to look at that post and provide feedback. We'll be kicking off that distribution in the near future. I encourage everyone to participate there.

Last few updates just on the trading side. Trading announced Trading Leagues, which is a first of its kind product, which enhances the overall experience for traders who can earn weekly prizes. There are five leagues: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. All traders started in the Bronze League and will work their way up each week based on performance. Corey, who is on the call, is the mastermind behind that system. So far, it's been a great way to identify and reward the most active traders on the platform, and I'm sure he'd be happy to answer any questions from the audience on that.

And then lastly, on the trading side in Epoch 6, dYdX Trading announced that the fee schedule was reduced by up to 66% for a minimum of three months. This significantly reduces the cost of trading on dYdX. The fees are much more in line with other peers in the market. So overall a lot of really exciting announcements across the board, across the dYdX Foundation, trading, product, Hedgies NFTs, and it's been great to see a lot of momentum of the course of Epoch 6. We’re looking forward to continuing that momentum into Epoch 7 and beyond.

Lastly, from just an administrative standpoint, Epoch 6 ended on Feb 15th. Rewards will be claimable as per usual, approximately seven days after the end of the Epoch. So that'll be on February 22nd, early next week, at approximately 7:30 PM. UTC. Once tokens have been claimed they can be transferred, staked to the safety module, or delegated to dYdX governance. That's it on my side. Thanks, James.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thank you, David. Okay. So, where we'll go from here, we'll work through a list of pre-populated questions that were asked in the Discord and on Twitter, and then we'll open the stage up for an AMA. Okay. Corey, if we could start with you, first question that came in, the Trading Leagues and Hedgies NFT launch have been a real success and on reflection, is there anything you feel the team could have done, or anything you feel could have gone smoother or the team would've done differently?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think there are always ways in which we can improve the product launches, but overall, I think these two launches in particular went pretty well. The site and the projects themselves didn't face any downtime, which was good. All the docs were released and pretty thorough. I would say, one thing that we could do better in the future is getting more distribution of our new features or new announcements or anything like that. We're working on ways in which we could do so. Working with other firms, other people who are close with other media providers and outlooks, things like that, to get better distribution for a lot of these announcements. With that in mind, we'll be able to better grow the products themselves and the dYdX protocol more broadly. Distribution more broadly, I'd say is one thing we could work on.

James (dYdX Foundation): Okay, great. There was a lot of talk regarding our high volume at the end of the Epoch. I mean, what do you feel the reason is for that high volume?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah. So, this is something we pretty much see every Epoch. The way the rewards work, you are sometimes incentivized to conduct more volume at the end of Epoch, as you know what the price of $DYDX is or what you think it'll be by the time you receive it. So, I mean, one thing we absolutely do, is monitor for any wash trading throughout and specifically at the end of the Epoch. We flag that and we don't enable any traders who conduct wash trading to receive any of those rewards. Having said that the vast majority of all volume throughout the whole Epoch was certainly real volume. Even though there is some incentivization to conduct more volume at the end of Epoch, all the volume, again, the vast majority of it was real in the sense that it was adding or taking real liquidity from the platform, which just incentivizes more liquidity providers and makers and such to continue to post more of their assets on dYdX.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks Corey. Moving on to the mobile app launch, do we have an accurate ETA for the launch?

Corey (dYdX Trading): So, we are certainly heads down on the mobile app. I know we've been saying this for quite a while now, but we're getting very close to a beta launch. We're targeting that somewhere, I would say, within the next four weeks, hopefully. We'll have some mechanics for people to be able to onboard to the beta, but TBD on that. But we're definitely heads down focused on that, maybe by the next Epoch review, we'll have some public announcement around it, but if not, certainly the one after that.

James (dYdX Foundation): Brilliant. Thank you. What are the plans for the referral and/or affiliate program?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah, so the affiliate program, again, this is another feature that we're also working on. Essentially, the goal is here is to have some sort of self-service affiliate program, similarly to what you might find on a centralized exchange. Right now, we do have an affiliate program, but it's quite manual and we reserve it for key influencers. We're going to be working on something here where any user of dYdX will be able to become an affiliate and share their link with other users or with their friends and such, and then earn revenue based on the users that they onboard. The timeline here, I think we're likely looking at early April, somewhere around there. So again, we're still working on it, designing it, and building it out on the back end. But this is something that is on the near-term roadmap for sure.

James (dYdX Foundation): That's awesome to hear. Speaking of roadmaps, for sub-accounts then, is this on a similar timeframe or is this happening?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Sub-accounts are something that we've heard a lot of users want. Especially a lot of trading institutions. We definitely hear everyone who's asking about it. It is something that is also on the roadmap. Again, I'd say we're probably looking at early to mid-April or something like this. We're still designing exactly what sub-accounts will look like on dYdX, but we are working quite diligently on releasing that product as well, within the next month or two.

James (dYdX Foundation): Okay. That's fantastic. In terms of dYdX and competition, is this something that dYdX thinks about frequently with the ever-increasing user base of other DEX’s?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah, so competition of course, is always top of mind for us. We're always looking at who's launching what, what the landscape is looking like. I guess for us, when we look at where we want to be, our role is always to become the biggest exchange in all crypto. So, for us, we view the biggest competitors as the big centralized exchanges of the world, like Binance and FTX etc. So, we're focused on trying to get users there, to migrate over to DeFi and specifically dYdX. Also, there are a vast amount of decentralized derivative competitors as well. On one hand, nobody has had the ability to grow like dYdX quite yet. On the other hand, many are trying, and there's some pretty interesting products out there that we certainly keep an eye on.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, Corey. Next, has changing the collateral from $USDC to DAI been considered at all?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah. So, this is something, at least in the current version of the protocol that isn't possible to change. There's just a lot of things that go into like what is the type of collateral that we use? We definitely did, think quite critically about this when launching the protocol. I mean, for a variety of reasons, we settled on $USDC, mainly because the liquidity on $USDC is much higher, it's available on many centralized exchanges. Market makers are much more comfortable holding $USDC than DAI. We certainly are aware of the potential centralization issues that come from $USDC versus DAI. But we made the conscious decision to use it anyway for the product and usability purposes. In future versions of the protocol, we are looking at other types of collateral that we could use. Potentially, multi-collateral. These are all things that are still on the table and we're actively researching.

James (dYdX Foundation): Brilliant. And then finally, would it be possible to publish KPIs, like open interest, volume, users etc., relative to other centralized exchanges or decentralized exchanges on a monthly basis? Or is there anywhere else that the community can find this information?

Corey (dYdX Trading): So all of this information is already published on metrics at dydx.exchange. So, we have open interest, volume and users. Relative to other centralized exchanges or other decentralized exchanges, yeah I mean, that's certainly possible to have on other data platforms. Places like Token Terminal do this, at least comparing decentralized exchanges with each other. So, they already built this out and then on a centralized exchange basis, you can quickly compare on CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap and we can compare on what it looks like. I don't know if there is yet a really good dashboard that aggregates both CEX and DEX metrics together. A tool like this would be very useful. Maybe this is something that the dYdX Grants Program could investigate. I think that could be a cool project for the community.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thank you, Corey. That's all the questions for Trading at the moment. If people have any questions for Trading and they want to just ask on stage, just hold off until the end of the pre-populated questions, and then we can bring you on the stage. Next up for questions, Marc, who is our Chief Legal Officer at dYdX. There's just a couple of questions in regard to IP rights to the Hedgies. If the community wanted to create something with the Hedgies, are they legally entitled to do so?

Marc (dYdX Trading): On the Hedgies, basically the way we approached it was to think of how we could get holders of Hedgies to the closest thing possible to actually owning all of the IP rights. So, basically the Hedgie License Agreement gives any Hedgie holder the right to use any aspect of the given Hedgie. So, diamond hands can be used separately from the rest of the Hedgie. The Hedgie can be used 'as one' and can be used in whatever way they want, whether it's for commercial or personal reasons. The only exception to that is Hedgies that have the dYdX logo on it. There are some more restrictions on the use there, but still it's a very wide ranging use that's permitted.

When it comes to how the community can use Hedgies, the answer is, if the community comes together with a group of whatever number of Hedgies, and they want to create a video or other content around those specific Hedgies or features of the Hedgies that they own, then they are free to do so whether it's going to be for free or for commercial purposes. So, it's just a very broad ranging license that pretty much lets people do whatever they want.

James (dYdX Foundation): That's awesome. I think that's welcome news to a lot of the Hedgies owners there. So, that's fantastic. From the perspective of the Grants Progrm, CBergz, just a few questions for you guys. I mean, over the past two funding rounds, how much has the Grants Committee fully rewarded to contributors?

CBergz (dYdX Grants): As mentioned, we've had two rounds so far, we've had 17 applicants as of those two rounds and we've pledged a total of $768,000 in $DYDX funding as reference to the first rounds. We have a third round coming up, that's going to be published today, that's been approved by the committee that will include another seven grantees with another total of $234,000 in funding. So, if you include that, our total approved grantees are at 24 with just over $1,000,000 in pledged funding, now after three months.

James (dYdX Foundation): That's incredible. That's such a great number there. And then in terms of RFPs that are posted on the website, are these set-in stone, or if someone believes that they can provide value for dYdX and to dYdX, can they apply based on reasons that they believe are suitable?

CBergz (dYdX Grants): Yeah, definitely. So, as mentioned on the website, and as we've tried to communicate, these are really just ideas that we think of and that we've heard the community mention of, or that community members have brought up to us that they think would be a good project or some sort of community tool or anything that a grantee could work on. The list of RFPs is intended as a guideline or to help inspire other potential projects. We're very, very open and very much encourage potential grantees to apply based on anything that they might be interested in or believe would be a benefit to the protocol or community.

James (dYdX Foundation): Oh, brilliant. In terms of the long-term plan for the Grants Committee, how does the Grants Committee envision developing and scaling this out to continue to benefit the community?

CBergz (dYdX Grants): Yeah, so we published a post a little earlier today with the idea of discussing things that are public and what is our brand vision for this Grants Program. This includes how we envision that, the scaling and everything else to do with dYdX Grants. I recommend that everybody go to the dYdX Grants website and read that post that'll go over everything in detail, but to keep it brief, I split it into three different phases where the current phase that we're in today is the initial recruiting and sourcing of talented contributors through these smaller one off grants that we're doing right now, whereby we can effectively find active, highly qualified, talented community contributors that we can then use to build working groups around whereby we use their set of skills and then qualifications to then scale up into function specific groups. That will then be used to streamline growth around their expertise.

Going from there, after a couple years of that, you basically get to this sort of autonomous organization where the groups themselves just run this program. They can then initiate their own grants as necessary to build tools, projects, to scale their functions and keep the community growing and the protocol growing and then the community is in charge making sure that those groups function in the appropriate way and to the benefit of the protocol.

James (dYdX Foundation): That's awesome. Thanks, CBergz. And then David, moving on to yourself at the Foundation. Based on this Epoch, will there be any plans or talks to revamp or change rewards formula? I see some community members have posted on Commonwealth, but others are yet to respond to these.

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the community has control over the rewards and if the community wishes to change any of the rewards or governance contracts, it has the power to do so. I think my personal view is so far, there's a lot of one-off requests for changes without a lot of discussion or evidence, or just thoughtful engagement on those responses. I think there's definitely great ideas getting floated all the time. How does the community rally around the best ideas and go through the overall governance process? So, I definitely am encouraged to see changes and expect further changes to the formulas. Six months in, I think a lot of ways they've worked as intended, like everything, they can always be improved as we get more data and feedback. So, if you do have constructive ideas on how to improve the formulas, I encourage the community to voice that on Commonwealth and respond to the open threads that others have already drafted with their own views on recommendations there.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks David. In the volunteer section of the Discord, there was some talk on burrow structure and the potential launch of an Ambassador Program. Is there a rough ETA on when the Ambassador Program's going to be released?

David (dYdX Foundation): James, as the mastermind behind the Ambassador Program, I feel that question belongs to you.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, David. On the Ambassador Program, the architecture behind it is nearly finished. I think realistically having the Ambassador Program, which consists of what we'd like to see, is around six working groups. They're going to be known as burrows to us where members of the community can come in and contribute to high quality work, whether it be governance, social media, let's say analytics, risk analysis etc. That will most likely be released I think, within a month or so. So, it's coming soon.

Next question, with regards to the Foundation dashboard, are there discussions to eventually migrate the dashboard to L2 in the future? There's evidently issues with claiming and staking with the costs being quite high. Are there any plans for this?

David (dYdX Foundation): I guess on the dashboard side, right? That's just a front-end tool. I think the question is much more around the actual $DYDX and whether there's plans to bring that onto L2. I think at this time there are no plans to move it to L2. It'll remain, on Ethereum L1, unless the community decides otherwise. As always, the binding constraint here is just engineering bandwidth and there's other priorities, but if the community decides that this is really important and wants to build the tooling to bridge the token onto L2, or other L1’s they’re fully free to do so. But at this time, there are no concrete plans on our side.

James (dYdX Foundation): Okay. Thank you for that. And then touching on the delegation strategy that was really recently released, in terms of Endorsed Delegates. When are they going to be released where people can have a look at them and where can people find these and how are you guys vetting the delegates?

David (dYdX Foundation): Great question. So, all of this information is fully detailed in a post on Commonwealth. Basically, we're asking Endorsed Delegates to fill out a number of templates and publicly share those on the forums in a transparent way. Basically, it's a way for delegates to subject themselves to a given standard, provide releases about why they think they'd be a good delegate, provide more information about potential conflicts of interest, and really make the case to the broader $DYDX holder space on why they should be delegated either voting or proposal power to. If you're interested in becoming a delegate, I encourage you to look at those templates provided on Commonwealth, fill those out, post your profile and pitch on the forums. Similarly, we will be doing a lot of outreach to larger token holders and trying to help facilitate delegation into the hands of active community members, or anyone who is an Endorsed Delegate and wants to participate more proactively in the overall governance process.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks David. Finally, from a contribution standpoint, if the community wants to get more active and more involved in dYdX's activities, how can they go about this? Is it simply going on to the governance forum and posting? Should they DM people on Discord? I mean, what's the best way for this?

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah, this is a great question. I think we've made great strides on this one over the last six months or so, but it's still a challenge for a lot of people to navigate. How and where do I contribute? Where do I get started? What are the different platforms to get involved with? I think at a minimum, obviously joining the Discord, getting involved, understanding the issues is kind of step one. Being helpful on Discord answering questions comes easily with that. I think there's a volunteer channel that was set up on Discord, where we ask anyone interested in volunteering with the DAO to complete a short survey and provide information in terms of where they think it can be helpful. So, that's another opportunity. The next is looking at the grants and the RFPs, and either applying for an existing grant and/or submitting an idea for a new grant and working, getting funded to work on a project that benefits the protocol overall.

Another opportunity is to just be much more active on Commonwealth and act as a steward for good governance, respond to open threads, ask for clarification etc. Lastly, as we move closer to launching the Ambassador Program and the burrows, the Foundation team is spending a lot of time thinking about how do we take all of the exciting and amazing talent that lives in our community and how do we help create structure to get people into pods, where there's a functional need for the community to gravitate around. We encourage anyone interested in getting more intimately involved to stay tuned for more information on the Ambassador Program. Those are just a few ideas on how to get involved today. Certainly, the community is something that we're collectively trying to build from the ground up. And so, if there's any other ideas that you have, we encourage you to get involved in really any capacity possible to help drive growth for the protocol.

James (dYdX Foundation): Yeah, that's great. David, thank you. I'll just reiterate from the volunteering section form, we have had over 300 applications to volunteer for certain services, for language translation, for governance aspects of things. So, we hear you, we've reviewed them and we're almost just waiting for the Ambassador Program to get off the floor until we reach out. So, stay tuned there.

David (dYdX Foundation): So, the last point I would add, it goes back to one of the things that Corey mentioned earlier, which is really on distribution, right? I think everyone recognizes that there's a lot more we can do on the marketing side, across the overall protocol. I think the community definitely plays a role in that. One very easy way to start to have impact today is like really also getting the word out on product announcements, on AMAs, on any interesting things going on in the community. Retweeting existing official accounts, or coming up with your own content, is a really easy and low hanging fruit opportunity to really have a lot of impact today.

James (dYdX Foundation): Great point. And then just final few questions, which can be answered really by any member of the team. In terms of governance and/or staking, will that be accessible in the app when that gets released? Or is it just a trading-based app?

Corey (dYdX Trading): This will strictly be a trading app. So similarly, if you go to “Trade” on the dYdX exchange, all the functionality that you would see there would be the mix in this app, but nothing relating to staking $DYDX.

James (dYdX Foundation): Okay. That's brilliant. Thank you for clearing that up. And then another question from a member of the Discord, a couple of minutes ago. Would it be possible to have a rough roadmap created for the Hedgies in the future, or is this narrative purely driven from the community from now on?

Corey (dYdX Trading): So, it's largely community driven. So, we certainly will integrate Hedgies into the product a little bit more. So, for instance with social profiles and things like that, but things like creating lore or anything on social media, things like that will be community led. Obviously, we’ll still run the Twitter account, but it's largely going to be community driven. We'll do some things, perhaps we'll do in person events with Hedgies and stuff like that, but the more the community can do, the better the Hedgies ecosystem will be.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thank you. If the community does have any ideas on distribution strategies for the Hedgies, where can they voice them and feel like they're heard? I mean, is that again, David, through the kind of governance forums where the community can come in and razz on?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Discord channels are probably going to be the best place to talk about Hedgies. So, we have the Hedgies section for it. There's no Hedgies treasury or anything like that. So, everything that the community wants to do, they theoretically can do if everyone rallies around it. There's no sense of voting or anything like that associated with the Hedgies.

David (dYdX Foundation): At least for the Foundation allocation or purchase of 205 Hedgies. Again, we've laid out quite a few ways that we plan to distribute those Hedgies and incentivize good governance and growth. But certainly, if enough community members express that they want a certain allocation to be transferred to the community treasury, it's something that we could consider as well. But I think I agree with Corey that generally speaking, Discord is probably the best place, but then anything more related to a larger Hedgies allocation or anything related to governance, our forums on Commonwealth are a good venue for that as well.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. And then finally, for the last questions from the pre-populated ones, will there be a merch shop with clothes from dYdX and the Hedgies?

Corey (dYdX Trading): So, basically the answer to this is yes. Still working out the details of what that will look like. Maybe like the Grants team or David can talk more about that. I think the Grants team might be exploring something along those lines.

CBergz (dYdX Grants): That is correct. We have some grants proposals that we're working through to see what we can do on the merchandising grant.

James (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. That's great news. So that's everything from the pre-populated questions. I don't know if anyone in the audience wants to ask any questions, please raise your hand and we can bring you up here. I mean, like David said at the start, we want to make it as interactive as possible. So come up on the stage and ask any questions you like. Just raise your hand and I'll bring you on, I mean, there's one question that's just popped up on Discord. Will you consider lowering the minimum gasless deposit amount?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Yeah. That's a good suggestion and that's actually something we're looking into. So yeah, within next few weeks, we actually may lower it. TBD.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, Corey. Okay, @theboringtrad3r. Welcome to the stage. Ask away.

Theboringtrad3r (Community Member): Hi everyone. I have a few questions. I feel like these questions are for the future, but since James brought up the competition topic, I'll just ask anyway. So, this question is for Marc. You briefly mentioned about the competition program in your podcast. Can you briefly explain more about the program, and does it require the dYdX protocol to be fully decentralized to launch the program?

Marc (dYdX Trading): Are you talking about the trading competition that we had?

Theboringtrad3r (Community Member): Yes. The trading competition. The brand new competition that you were saying that the team is working on behind the scenes.

Marc (dYdX Trading): To give you more context on that. We've had historical trading competitions before we launched the Trading Leagues. I think I'll defer to Corey on what the plans are for different trading competitions. I think in the future, the plan is to just have the Trading League and to not have additional competitions.

The context I was giving on this podcast I gave a while ago was really just about keeping true to dYdX’s nature, as not collecting information about its users unnecessarily. So, specifically when it comes to the trading competitions that we've had in the past, that we've given prizes and worked on finding ways to comply with our tax obligations while not also giving up user privacy. That's just something that we paid special attention to. I'll let Corey comment on whether we'll have any trading competitions separate from the Trading Leagues in the future.

Corey (dYdX Trading): The Trading Leagues are going to be the main form of competitions. Ideally, we want all new users or people interested in competitions more broadly to participate in the Trading Leagues. So, every week there's a new competition. You have the opportunity to level up or level down depending on how well you perform. The better you perform the better your rewards will be. We’ll give out various $USDC prizes every week.

Also, we give out Hedgies prizes to top winners and specific leagues as well.

All that information can be viewed in more detail on the website, but yeah, that's going to be the main form of competitions for the foreseeable future.

James (dYdX Foundation): Okay. @Nick, I'll just unmute you. @Nick, fire away.

Nick (Community Member): Thanks for taking the time with this forum. It's really great. So, I did hear the answer about the Hedgies and the long-term outlook and it being in the hands of the community. The one thing that you did mention that was kind of in your hands is the profile launch. So, it's a little vague and I was wondering if you could just elaborate on that one piece, how the actual profiles would be integrated into the platform.

Corey (dYdX Trading): The idea here is as we think about what profiles look like on dYdX, the idea would be like, if you hold a certain Hedgie in your wallet, that could be your profile photo on the website or on the trading app and as other people view the leaderboards and such, your Hedgie might be featured next to your username or something like that. We're still exploring what that could or might look like, but that's the broader idea.

James (dYdX Foundation): Let's just move on to @Ram. @Ram, how are you?

Ram (Community Member): I just have one simple question. How are we seeing the future projections of the dYdX Grants Program and how do we see ourselves competing with the onboarding speed of projects as compared to our competitors, like programs that are scaling widely in Asian countries? So, what are those future synergies that we're seeing with the dYdX Grants Program and how are we going to improve its visibility in the coming days or coming quarters?

CBergz (dYdX Grants): I appreciate the question. Definitely. We're going to increase visibility as the grants start to be completed and kick off really given that we've only had two rounds and we're still working through the initial funding of these rounds. We have seen some grants go through significant progress already with even one that's completed its initial grant. On the loner-term scale, we will be including these initial contributors to start to build working groups.

So that's to streamline growth in efficiency around these specific functions to allow for qualified community individuals and teams to build longer term projects and longer-term teams that focus on specific functions to benefit the protocol. In our opinion, that will help us make it quite attractive for these highly qualified contributors and be able to see their activity, applications, and involvement.

Ram (Community Member): That's nice to hear and just adding to this, are we also thinking of integrating our Grants Program into various developer ecosystem conferences or the global conferences like sponsoring hackathons or projects that go with conferences as well?

Corey (dYdX Trading): Definitely. That's a big part of it. Sponsorships are a big part of it. We've already committed to sponsoring a few events and we’re in talks with a number of other events as well. We're super open to other sponsorships as well, so if anyone knows of any conferences that they are attending that they feel would be a good event to sponsor then feel free to reach out.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks @Ram. Thanks for your time. Okay, now @Lemaymay.

Lemaymay (Community Member): Is there some kind of synchronicity between the V4 release and the Starknet mainnet, or the Starknet beta? I have not been able to find any information about the release date? The only thing that I've seen stated publicly is that you aim for decentralization by the end of the year. I was wondering if it's because you don't have a deadline specifically for Starknet release? Or if we even can elaborate on it?

Corey (dYdX Trading): So, it's something that we're still researching. We've never said publicly, what V4 will look like or what it will be built on, so can't commit to Starknet or any other thing, but yeah, we're definitely working on researching what it will still look like. That is all that I can share on that.

James (dYdX Foundation): Thanks @Lemaymay. Okay. @Broody, probably last question from you whenever you're ready.

Broody (Community Member): I just had a simple question about the Hedgies. I love these Hedgies. I was wondering, is there any plans to perhaps release the TAC files for these 3D models or is that not the case?

James (dYdX Foundation): I know that was asked before and I did bring it up with the team. Marc, didn't we confirm that potentially we have the 3D files or is this something that can be released?

Marc (dYdX Trading): I'm not sure where we came out on that as a team. So, I have to get back to you on it. So, we'll get back.

James (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. @Broody, I'll reach out and on Discord and once we have a confirmed answer on that, I can let you know.

Broody (Community Member): I appreciate it. Thank you.

James (dYdX Foundation): Cool. Thanks for your time. Okay guys, we have had a productive discussion and we are at time. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for tuning in. I hope it was informative. As soon as this AMA is finished, we'll digest all the information and work on the blog post. We'll translate the audio file, and then we'll post it as soon as we can. So, it's likely going to be over a week before it's public on the blog post and yeah, we'll go from there. Anything else from David, Corey, Marc, or CBergz?

David (dYdX Foundation): Thanks James for hosting and thanks everyone for joining.

James (dYdX Foundation): Have a great weekend and we'll see you next week.