dYdX built the on-chain perpetuals playbook years before Hyperliquid existed. We traded on its v4 Cosmos chain, checked its live 24-hour volume against the competition and read what its own MegaVault page now says about the vault's operator.
dYdX shipped a decentralized order book with real leverage years before most traders had heard of an on-chain perpetuals exchange. That head start used to be the whole pitch. We opened the v4 app, placed test orders on BTC-USD, and pulled the numbers the interface shows about its own current standing, because the honest story here is as much about what changed around dYdX as what dYdX itself does.
What v4 actually is
Since its move off Ethereum, dYdX runs as its own Cosmos app-chain: an off-chain order book operated by validators, with trades settling on-chain and funds never leaving self-custody. That is a real architectural difference from a centralized exchange, and it is also different from Hyperliquid's fully on-chain order book running on a custom L1. Neither approach is wrong, but they trade off differently, and dYdX's model means the interface itself is run by what the app calls the "dYdX Ops subDAO," using software open-sourced by dYdX Trading Inc.
The number that tells the real story
We opened the Markets page rather than trust a third-party estimate, and the total across all 123 listed pairs came to roughly 40 million dollars in 24-hour volume at the moment we checked. Independent trackers comparing dYdX to Hyperliquid put the gap in the same range: Hyperliquid's reported volume runs into the tens of billions on an active day, more than two hundred times what dYdX's own dashboard showed us. dYdX was once the exchange other perpetuals DEXs measured themselves against. That comparison now runs the other direction.
