Reported by Cointelegraph, the dYdX community approved staking 20 million DYDX tokens to strengthen security as the decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) experiences a surge in activity.
The proposal passed on April 6 with 91.7% of votes in favor, allowing tokens from the community treasury worth over $61 million at current prices to be staked with liquid staking protocol Stride. According to dYdX, the move is a response to the growing trading activity on the protocol:
“The rate of DYDX being staked to validators has plateaued and deposits to the exchange are growing at a tremendous pace. Over $140M USDC is held in dYdX v4, of which roughly $100M arrived in the past week.”
By staking its native tokens, the DEX is seeking to shield its network from a possible control attack, similar to a 51% attack. This type of attack happens when a malicious entity gains control over a significant amount of a blockchain’s hashing power, enabling the network to be manipulated. Decentralizing voting power prevents such attacks from occurring.
dYdX noted that its network architecture enables a scenario where an attacker, with just one-third of the voting power, could pause on-chain operations. Additionally, possessing two-thirds of the voting power could allow such actors to potentially misuse the funds of users and the community within the dYdX Chain.
“Since the voting power today is $456M, a malicious actor must contribute at least $912M in staked DYDX to take control of the protocol, which would allow them to exploit user deposits and community assets. This sounds like a lot today, but it isn’t such a high barrier when we factor in that only 11.5% of the total supply of DYDX are staked.”
dYdX
