On November 29th, the dYdX Foundation hosted a discussion on Discord regarding general updates, current governance proposals and an Epoch 3 review. The discussion was followed by a community hangout and AMA with the dYdX Trading team.

A redacted transcript is available below:

David (dYdX Foundation): Everyone thanks for joining the dYdX Epoch 3 community review and AMA. We're going to spend the next 60 minutes having an open discussion with the community. In terms of agenda, I'll spend the first 15 minutes walking through the Epoch 3 review and key milestones that happened over the course of Epoch 3. Then we're excited to host Derek and the Reverie team to discuss an active thread on Commonwealth regarding the dYdX community Grants Program and their proposal that they put together. Then we'll open it up for about 30 minutes of community questions. If anyone has any questions, just post them in the discussions channel and we can help aggregate them there. Otherwise, you can also raise your hand and we'll bring you up on stage and you can ask your question to the dYdX team. On the call today you have David, myself from the dYdX Foundation team, as well as several people from the dYdX trading team. We're really excited to answer any questions that the community has, so I'll get started now. We just published the Epoch 3 review on our blog, and I'll walk through some of the highlights that happened over the course of Epoch 3. So, the total Epoch volume on the layer two protocol reached $89 billion over the course of Epoch 3 with average daily volume remaining steady at around $3 billion and ending open interest remained flat - there was a correction over the course of Epoch 3. We saw OI decline but then recover and TVL continues to increase. We actually surpassed a billion dollars in TVL over the course of the Epoch, but it does remain quite volatile. So overall continuing to see really strong growth on the protocol, which is awesome and continuing in an upward trend in line with the overall market.

In terms of $DYDX tokens, about 9,000 unique wallets earned 5.4 million $DYDX through trading, liquidity provider and staking rewards over the course of Epoch 3. To date, about 42,000 unique wallets have previously earned $DYDX rewards from the retroactive trading and liquidity mining rewards. There are about 22,000 unique wallets currently holding both $DYDX and/or $stkDYDX tokens. So, continuing to see general increase in adoption and proliferation of unique wallets holding $DYDX as we build out the community overall.

In terms of specific programs, in Epoch 3 there were 18 market maker addresses that were eligible for LP rewards. While the majority of rewards were earned by two market makers, competition in the pool has increased since the maker volume threshold for eligibility decreased to 1%. Market makers meeting the 1% threshold in Epoch 3 are now eligible to earn rewards in Epoch 4. 15 addresses did more than 1% of maker volume in Epoch 3, and thus, can start earning rewards in Epoch 4.

In terms of the liquidity staking pool, we saw that continue to grow. There was about 809 million $USDC staked from 1,443 stakers over the course of Epoch 3. Three market makers began testing $USDC borrowing from the staking pool, but those efforts were largely on hold after an issue with one of the stark proxy contracts.

So, over the course of Epoch 3 Wintermute submitted a proposal to upgrade the stark proxy smart contract, and that was ultimately executed on-chain following a governance proposal. The Foundation is really excited to see the amount of capital staked there and expecting borrowing from market makers from that pool to increase going forward following the upgrade, which ultimately will help drive liquidity to all markets on dYdX.

The major update that I'm sure everyone is familiar with, is that the safety module is finally reset to clean state. dYdX staking and earning of dYdX rewards is now active. Following several months of discussions and governance proposals, the safety module smart contract was finally upgraded and relaunched on November 20th, a few days before the end of Epoch 3.

By the end of Epoch 3 there was 7 million $DYDX staked to the pool from 602 users. Currently, there's about 33 million $DYDX currently staked to the pool. We understand there was a number of investors that staked their locked tokens. Following community feedback, we've asked those investors to refrain from staking to the dYdX safety module. Again, as we've made very public in a lot of our communications from a technical and legal standpoint, these venture investors have locked tokens, but they're technically able to stake those tokens to the safety module. Again, it's their decision, but there are legal considerations in the event of a slashing scenario in the event of a shortfall event. So, we've asked based on community feedback for those investors to refrain from staking. We're hopeful that APRs will continue to remain high and that only earn tokens via the various reward pools that we've set up will be the main use case for circulating $DYDX tokens.

In terms of the overall supply, there's about 7.19% of the total $DYDX supply, which is now considered liquid at the end of Epoch 3. Again, this excludes any unearned retroactive rewards which were transferred to the treasury and the $DYDX that vests in the community treasury on an Epoch-by-Epoch basis. So that's just an overall status on some key metrics. Again, we'll be publishing all of these on our blog for you to track.

In terms of governance overall, I think Epoch 3 we saw really strong engagement on the forums and a number of on-chain proposals discussed and executed. It was really awesome to see the community vote strongly in favor of passing several DIPs, including the Safety Module Staker Reimbursement and Compensation DIP, the Safety Module Restoration DIP, and the Upgrade to the StarkProxy smart contract.

Overall, we saw we have about 800 or so unique addresses that have voted in a governance proposal, and that continues to increase as people become more familiar with the governance cycle more broadly. There is also a number of very active discussion threads on Commonwealth, and we see the community continue to debate a whole range of issues surrounding governance, the exchange, new assets, and then, one thread in particular that I'm really excited about, the team is really excited about, and that we think will help drive kind of further decentralization and growth for the protocol is a proposal that a community member, Reverie has put together on launching a dYdX Grants Program to empower contributors and the broader community to actively build projects that benefit everyone overall. We're lucky to have the Reverie team join us today, and they'll provide kind of a broad overview of their idea. In the future, we're excited to continue to host these community AMAs, and would love to bring on additional partners to help explain what they're working on. So, stay tuned for future community updates, and if you do want to participate, feel free to DM me directly.

Last two points I wanted to cover are kind of next steps on Epoch 3. So, Epoch 3 ended on November 23rd. As per usual, rewards are claimable seven days after the end of the Epoch, so rewards will be available starting tomorrow on November 30th at around 4:00 PM UTC. Once tokens have been claimed, they can be transferred, they can be staked to the safety module or delegated to dYdX governance.

The last update is around the deposit contract bug that was highlighted publicly late last week. Just wanted to kind of talk about that and then happy to answer any questions in the AMA.

On November 27th, the dYdX team was alerted of a security issue with one of the deployed smart contracts for deposits to the dYdX exchange. If you have set allowance to deposit to the exchange after Wednesday, November 24th, your funds are now held in an Escrow account as a precaution for potentially getting hacked. The team has published important recovery information on how to recover those, but as a result of that, some of the new features that were launched this week on the exchange or last week on the exchange, including gasless deposits and 0x swap integrations have been deactivated until further notice. So, if you did deposit funds to the exchange after Wednesday of last week, please make sure to check out the recovery information and DM the team and read all of the information that has been publicly available through all of our channels. So those are kind of some of the major highlights. Again, we'll be publishing kind of our typical Epoch 3 review AMA later today.

And with that, I'd love to bring on Derek from the Reverie team to just provide a brief update on their proposed Grants Program and provide an overview of kind of what's to come there.

Let me bring Derek up on stage. While I do that again, if anyone has any questions, please submit them in the discussions channel. We'll be addressing those and then bringing people on stage after Derek gives an overview of the Reverie program.

Derek (Reverie): Hey everyone! So as David said, my name is Derek from Reverie. We posted a temp check on Commonwealth a few weeks ago about a dYdX Grants Program. I got some helpful feedback. We're working on a longer response to answer some of those questions we've posted on the forums, responding to a bunch of the comments already, but just working through a more detailed post about how the program will be run, what the application process will look like, any sort of KPIs, picking out the committee. That will hopefully be up in the next day or two. And I think for the next 5-10 minutes, Cbergz and I will give a quick background on the Grants Program. Talk a bit more about specific things that we're excited about and interested in funding. Yeah, really let you guys ask questions for us during the Q&A as well.

So, to give some high-level on the Grants Program, the purpose is pretty straightforward. A lot of community members, including many of you on the call actively contribute and have good ideas on how to help dYdX grow long-term and have different thoughts on the kinds of things that the treasury should be spending money on. There are tons of tons of ideas in the forums and the posts on Discord. Grants is a really a simple way to allow people to pursue these opportunities and work full-time or part-time on different areas that apply to. So, it could be research projects, dev work, education, marketing growth. It could be like a few hours of work for a few thousand or much longer term, like things that take months. I think the scope is quite large, like regardless of your background or your age or your geography. Like Grants is, we encourage you guys to actively look into applying and looking at the RFPs and just seeing what you'd be interested in working on.

In terms of like longer term we think the most important thing is to give the community skin in the game in terms of just getting people more actively engaged in governance and to eventually have many, many people aside from Reverie itself. Like working on community-funded things.

Reverie itself, and we're an organization that actively works for DAOs. We help with things such as grants, treasury management, growth, and other things. We are involved in a few other communities, aside from dYdX such as Compound, Uniswap, Radical. We are long-term dYdX users been following it and using it since 2018, we saw the evolution from margin to perpetual. So yeah, super pumped to actively contribute and work with you guys on this. Now, we're going to turn it over to Cbergz who is a grants lead, and he will share a bit more about the kinds of things that the program is looking to fund.

Cbergz (Reverie): Thanks Derek. Yeah, I'm Cbergz, just a quick intro. I've been in this space for like 6-7 years now working alongside large crypto market makers most of that time, many of which today are some of the largest active users of dYdX. So, I'm just super excited to be involved here and moving towards governance, and working and helping the dYdX community grow and really push things forward and grow the contributor base and push forward governance growth. As Derek mentioned, overall, Grants Program goal here to really simplify things is to attract 10x contributors that will help grow the product and the community, and kind of push forward the existing governance community that we have here in dYdX. One of the added benefits of that is it builds kind of this additional growth layer on top of dYdX and helps push the brand forward and helps incentivize token involvement and just kind of, yeah. Just generally grows the community, and we're super excited to be able to help give back and help incentivize contributions to the underlying product. So, we have outlined a few ideas for grants ranging from external standalone trading tools, like potential premium page that shows like different dated ranges for premiums, could be like a CLI trading tool or anything like that. Like that's more the technical side. Then we have like governance tools, dashboards, super analytics tools can be something that's totally non-technical like a newsletter or some sort of campaign like that.

We're also just super open to the community, getting their ideas and how people come forward that have skills that we might just not be aware of or that have been using the product for years. That kind of the niche towards wanting to build something that they think could be done and that maybe could stand alone. Now we're hoping that to have this be the platform effectively, that gives that opportunity.

So, if anybody has anything feel free to look me up on Discord.

In terms of next steps, we'll just be posting an updated post to the one that we have. We really appreciate feedback and it's great to see the community get involved here. We'll be posting an update with additional comments to kind of more structure and guidelines as to how it will actually work and how we plan on moving forward with this. Again, we're just really looking forward to more feedback on that post.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Derek, Cbergz thanks for joining and sharing some updates. Again, encourage the community to get involved on Commonwealth, participate in the forums, provide feedback. Again, I think as Derek mentioned, a Grants Program is a really great way to align incentives and get more people to build cool things around the community. So, encourage everyone here to get involved. This is really a great vehicle to get paid, to contribute and grow the overall ecosystem. With that, I want to open up the discussion to any questions that the community has. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to just write them on Discord or raise your hand, and we'll bring you up on stage. I'll walk through just two questions or one question in the meantime as people get organized. This one's probably best for Everett. Everett, can you provide an update on the status of the deposit proxy contract bug, and kind of what are next steps and what happened there.

Everett (dYdX Trading): Cool. Yeah, the deposit contract vulnerability was a pretty big bummer. The current next steps are on the trading app. We have a prompt on the trading app that walks our traders through the process of securing their wallet against that vulnerability. It's not extremely complicated, but it is extremely important to unset allowances on all the tokens that you set allowances for, since the new deposit contract that was launched last Wednesday around 9:00 AM Pacific time. At this point, we're not disclosing exactly what the vulnerability is just to protect our users who haven't unset their allowance, whose wallets are technically still vulnerable to that bug. So, if that is you definitely go to the trading app, basically right after this call or even now, and unset your allowances. If you did have funds in your wallet that were affected by the vulnerability like David mentioned, they're in an Escrow smart contract right now, so they're perfectly safe, but you will need to reclaim those tokens and the app will walk you through that process as well. So, for the time being, we're waiting for the word to get out and for the majority of our users to unsend allowance on that smart contract. Once we do, we will release a very detailed post-mortem about the vulnerability itself, as well as how we went about building the Escrow smart contract, how all that stuff worked, as well as due process in preventing stuff like this in the future. Then we will re-release the 0x deposit and gasless deposit feature in a new smart contract that obviously does not have the vulnerability.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, Everett. We have a question from an audience member, so I'll bring him up on stage. Until before he joins, I'll just address another question around VC staking to the safety module. So let me just get through that and then we'll run into your question.

So, the question is, why are VCs allowed to stake to the safety module? Again, what we publicly disclose is that we understand that there's strong community backlash against investors staking their locked tokens and the safety module. The Foundation has asked all investors to not stake their locked $DYDX tokens, and to withdraw any $DYDX currently staked. One large whale has told us that they plan to unstake, but it is still out of our control and it's ultimately their decision. Ultimately, again, all investors are required to comply with the transfer restrictions that are enforced through contractual agreements with the dYdX Foundation. The dYdX Foundation does track wallet addresses to determine whether any transfers have been made in violation of that restriction. But just to be clear, the lock-ups for investors, prior employees, or consultants of dYdX Trading Inc., those agreements allow for investors to use their $DYDX to make proposals, delegate votes, or vote on the proposals related to the protocol. Ultimately, those transfer restrictions do enforce, you know, do have a lock-up schedule, and enforce the transfer restrictions more broadly. From a technical and legal standpoint, investors are allowed to stake their $DYDX to the safety module. The real issue again, as I mentioned earlier is in the event of a shortfall event and the slashing of $DYDX tokens, investors would get slashed like everyone else. At this time, they would be in default against those agreements, and investors would be required to purchase any tokens that were transferred as a result of slashing so that everyone would be in the same position prior, and investors would still be subject to the transfer restriction and the lock-up schedules in those agreements. The Foundation has expressed its willingness to bring legal action against investors who do not comply with these requirements more broadly.

Ultimately again, when we think about circulating supply and what is included on the website, really these are tokens that are vested in public hands that can be transferred. You know, we don't think that these locked tokens from investors or from the team fall into that circulating supply category. Ultimately, you know, all of those tokens are subject to contractual agreements with lock-ups that have been publicly disclosed. Again, you know, the Foundation does understand that there was strong community backlash and we've channeled that and communicated that to relevant investors. Ultimately, again, it is up to them, but just wanted to reiterate that we do really value community feedback and I think encourage the community to continue to express feedback. The Foundation is here to help support that in any way that we can. So, with that Community Member, the floor is yours. Feel free to ask your question.

David (dYdX Foundation): Sorry, I'm not sure if it was just on my side of the connection on your side was a little weak. I think your question related to dYdX in the US, is that right?

Speaker 1 (Community Member): Yes, why does dYdX have a problem with America?

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. I don't think dYdX has a problem with America per se. Again, maybe Marc you’re best positioned to talk a little bit about the regulatory environment and some of the decisions that the team has made around providing services to US-based people.

Marc (dYdX Trading): Yes, this ultimately comes down to the fact that on dYdX you are trading perpetuals contracts and, in the US, to offer perpetuals or enter into perpetuals you need to be what is referred to as an eligible contract participant or a registered exchange. Most of our users are not eligible contract participants or a registered exchange. So, under US law it is simply not permitted. You touched on, kind of, a decentralization question. There are two key aspects of this – one specific to dYdX and one that is not specific. I think the first thing specific to dYdX that we never hide, and we are very straight-forward about is the fact that while everything is non-custodial the trading engine is hosted centrally. The second part of it, that is not specific to dYdX is that all DeFi protocols and development companies are hosting their front ends in a centralized manner. So, when people are using a centralized front end and they are using it from the US there is a question as to whether the US regulators would have an issue with that or not. And I think what you see from many DeFi protocols and specifically derivatives protocols, is you see a position taken against US participants using them. Most of that's because of that centralized front end that exists, which is not something that's very easy to decentralize while maintaining a good user experience.

David (dYdX Foundation): Thanks, Mark. Good question. Next question I received by DM is a product-related question. Maybe this is best for Everett. What's the team focused on for the next three to six months besides full decentralization?

Everett (dYdX Trading): That's a good question. I would say there's broadly two categories that we're focused on over on the product side. The first one is just in general, improving the trading interface. There's been a lot of great feedback through the community, in the Discord, on Twitter or elsewhere of trading features that we've heard you guys would like to see. Amongst the top of that there's just only bracket orders, updates to the trading via chart, allowing you to see stop limit, take profit, orders on the chart and being able to edit those orders by dragging the line on the chart, stuff like that, very similar to what FTX has. We're compiling that list of all these feature requests that you guys are requesting, and that is a priority for us - improving your guys' trading experience. So, I would say that's the first category. That's also not just the next three to six months, right, that's pretty much indefinitely.

The second category I would say is more social features. So, you guys have heard about the NFTs, and we've got a couple other ones in the works. I won't reveal too much about that, and same with the NFTs. But one thing that I will say is self-service affiliate links, so allowing you guys to generate a referral link and send that out to your followers or whatever, and people that you would like to see on the platform and also get a little kickback from that. That's something we're working on as well. Additional abilities to share your position, well, your NFTs in the future and stuff like that. I would say that social aspect is a second category that we're working on.

Then maybe a third one that's not really category, but more of like an underlying thought that we're working on is just more utility for the $DYDX token; fostering and supporting that ecosystem is something that we are focused on and thinking of. So yeah, at a high level I would say that's a pretty good summary.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, Everett. Again, if anyone has any questions, feel free to raise your hand and we'll bring you up on stage. In the meantime, I'm just going to walk through other questions that we've got in via text.

One question that I got via DM is, what's critical findings dYdX team and Paradigm have found regarding the decentralization research and what the roadmap there looks like?

You know, Everett, maybe you can speak a little to this. I'm not sure there's a substantial update here, but it is something that the dYdX Trading team is actively focused on.

Everett (dYdX Trading): Yeah. It's just like you said, David, I would say that we're still, although full steam ahead on the decentralization research, still kind of in the early stages. So, we are exploring, kind of keeping an open mind and exploring a lot of different solutions. But as of right now, there's no concrete updates that would be meaningful I think for the community.

David (dYdX Foundation): Got it. And just to follow up on that, StarkNet just went live in Alpha today. dYdX may consider moving there in the future, or just general views about StarkNet.

Everett (dYdX Trading): Yeah. Right now we are still keeping an open mind and exploring lots of different solutions, so nothing definitive yet. I think pretty much anything's on the table at this point, right. So, kind of narrow down those options as we go. But again, right now still open, still early.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Thanks, Everett. I guess we had one question around the NFT project. Again, Everett probably won't disclose too much, but is there anything you would want to highlight there on the NFT side of things?

Everett (dYdX Trading): Yeah. It kind of kills me to not disclose too much. I'm extremely excited about the project. But yeah, I think you guys can expect this to launch early next year, basically January or February at the latest. I will say that we'll be launching another pretty large feature alongside NFTs that will be complementary to them.

So it will be, there's going to be a lot of excitement around that. We'll also have teasers for you guys soon-ish, but yeah, I don't want to give too much away. I think you guys will be quite excited to use what we have coming.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. One question we got from one user was regarding the integration to a layer two on Eth to make it cheaper for users to stake on stake deposit, is that on the roadmap? I think Corey or Everett maybe you can speak a little bit about gasless deposits and the 0x API integration and kind of what that feature enables.

Everett (dYdX Trading): Sorry. I don't quite understand the question, is that for the governance dashboard or for the trading application?

David (dYdX Foundation): I think let's start maybe with the trading application and then I can speak to the governance dashboards.

Everett (dYdX Trading): Got you. So, for the trading application, I would say that's not currently on the roadmap integrating with other layer twos. For us right now we're going to relaunch those gasless deposits, and I think that solves the problem for a lot of our users. The way that gasless deposits work just as a quick overview, if you guys haven't used it already, is we partner with Biconomy and they basically allow us to forward transactions through their smart contracts and they'll pay the gas fees. So, with that, we're able to offer our users truly gasless transactions and gasless deposits. So, you don't need to Eth in your wallet to deposit onto dYdX when you have a gasless transaction available, you just need whatever token that you're depositing. So yeah, with that I would probably argue that a lot of the problems with deposits onto dYdX are the gas fees on layer one, so we have solved that. I know it is more convenient, especially if you have funds on another layer two to have a bridge over directly to StarkWare, but I think that's quite a lot of work. As you guys know, our team is small, and we've got a lot of exciting things coming. So, I think we'd rather work on those and we'll get those cool features out to you guys rather than a bridge, and especially when we already have gasless deposits.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. And then I guess with regards to staking and staking for the governance-related contracts, again, all of those contracts currently are on Ethereum on layer one. Right now, there's no plans to upgrade those contracts or bring them to layer two. You know, we understand that there are blockers for people to participate in voting and for staking. You know, that's largely a result of just using Ethereum and a decentralized settlement layer to have transactions verified in a trustless manner. I think it's still pretty early to think about upgrading some of the smart contracts for governance, but certainly, welcome and encourage the community to actively explore potential solutions to increase participation in staking or participation in governance. You know, one area in particular that the StarkWear team has indicated that they're starting to research is a partnership with Snapshot to offer a roll-up for Snapshot voting. So, I think as various teams explore kind of new solutions to try to increase participation in governance, clearly, you know, high gas fees are a barrier to entry. I think everyone's well aware of that, but encourage potential partners and community members to have active discussions and explore kind of alternative options and hopefully have the community treasury fund some of those projects to again, reduce the barrier and friction to people to participate in governance more broadly.

So those are the questions that we've received so far. Great question so far. Again, I'm happy to bring anyone on stage, if there's any other questions that anyone from the community has on the product roadmap on the Foundation side or any of the comments that the Reverie team made. Here's a great forum to try to drive that. I guess I just got a DM from a Community Member on have you technically solved or come to consensus on how to decentralize the order books?

I think Everett kind of already addressed this or spoke to it a little, but I think there's no kind of material update from the team at this side. Again, the team has communicated that they're focused for the next 18 months on a decentralized version, a fully decentralized version of the protocol, including the order books. You know, the dYdX trading team has expressed that they're actively doing R&D on different options here. Again, once there is a more substantial update, that team will be able to provide something more public, but no material updates there as of yet.

Other question, are VCs allowed to stake? Can they also sell tokens with the view to buying them back? Again, all locked tokens, including the investor tokens are subject to a transfer restriction agreement, which the details of which have been made publicly on our GitBook, those investors would not be allowed to sell tokens with the view of buying them back.

Again, that would be in direct violation of the agreements that they signed. And the dYdX Foundation has expressed its willingness to pursue legal action in the event that something like that does happen.

So again, the transfer restrictions and locked tokens are subject to a four-year lockup with various kinds of milestone dates that have been shared publicly. Those tokens will remain locked and we will enforce that. Other questions, Everett, when light mode? Is that on the roadmap or an option for users on the front end?

Everett (dYdX Trading): Yeah, it is a much-requested feature. I guess I'll go a little bit deeper here where we, you guys know we have a mobile app coming up. I would say after we've launched that, I think the light mode should follow shortly after that. We just want the experience and the colors to be consistent across all of our products. So TLDR yes, but not anytime soon, likely after the launch of the mobile app.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Seeing some questions around adding new markets to the trading platform. I think just to recap, over the course of Epoch 3, the team continued to add new markets. I think the last market that was launched was the ZRX-USD perpetual contracts market. In terms of just adding new markets going forward, I think on Commonwealth we've seen a lot of one-off requests to add new markets, and certainly encourage the community to continue to propose adding new markets to the protocol.

I think one forum post in particular that I want to highlight is one that was submitted by Wintermute on Commonwealth, which tries to create kind of a more organized process around adding new markets. Again, from a technical standpoint, to add a new market, there's a few things that are required. One would be, you know, a workable Oracle for pricing, and then I think more importantly it's the fact that the market has to be added to the smart contract, which at this time requires a governance vote.

Given that we do, or the team currently operates an order book type model, we'd also need market makers to provide sufficient liquidity for any new markets that are added.

So, all of these factors I think play into kind of the business case around adding a new market to their protocol. I think I would encourage the community to take a look at the Wintermute proposal around putting together a specialized committee to evaluate new markets and to come up with a prioritization.

Ultimately, I think everyone would benefit from listing the markets that are most actively traded. I think right now the protocol currently supports 28 or so markets, but ultimately, you know, it's a question of prioritization. And then at this time any new markets have to go through governance.

So, I think rather than just submitting one-off markets, I think the community should kind of try to gravitate towards coming up with a more robust framework on how to evaluate which markets to add to the smart contract. So that is something that is I think of critical importance. I think the team is focused on listing as many assets as possible subject to an ultimate regulatory analysis, but ultimately encourage the community to continue to submit requests for adding new markets and then putting together a governance vote to help that pass. Everett, we're getting another question on kind of the mobile app. Again, not sure how much you want to share here, but any insights you could share with kind of the broader community at this time?

Everett (dYdX Trading): Just in general about the mobile app?

David (dYdX Foundation): Yeah. I mean, I think either on timelines or why is the team focused on building a mobile app and why does the team think that that's an important feature to have?

Everett (dYdX Trading): Got you. So, I'll talk about the timelines first. We're looking to launch the mobile app very shortly after the NFTs next year, so Q1 of next year is going to be very exciting. There's a lot coming. It is taking a little bit longer than expected, but we just want to make sure that we ship you guys a solid experience, a non-buggy experience. We want the experience to match what we have on desktop. So, we're doing a lot of testing and we're doing a lot of refinement on the user experience, and it's coming along really nicely. We'll have teasers and a potential beta program for you guys to opt into and help us test it out very soon actually, but the development is still in progress on that. We're kind of waist-deep in it and it's going well, but there's just a lot in the trading interface. We need to test all that, develop and make sure that the experience is good for you guys. So yeah, next year, shortly after NFTs, February, March at the latest yeah. Again, Q1 is going to be exciting.

For the reason why we're building the mobile app itself, one, we've gotten a lot of requests for it, but especially also a lot of our users in Asia especially do mainly use mobile. Very few of them use desktop, so to kind of help those users out and provide a good experience for them, having a mobile app is critical. So, it's kind of a no-brainer for us that we needed a mobile app and obviously mobile comes with a lot of benefits as well. You know, it's faster to load, you're not downloading the website every single time. It can be a faster experience, you have push notifications and more native functionality. So, all of that is just going to contribute to a better experience for our users.

David (dYdX Foundation): Awesome. Next question I received is when lending? I'm not exactly sure what this refers to, but what is clear is that the dYdX Trading team is now exclusively focused on decentralized derivatives. The layer one pools were wound down in the last Epoch or so. So, the team right now is entirely focused on decentralized derivatives and is not focused on kind of the lending markets more broadly. If this question refers more to lending of the $DYDX token, ultimately, I think that the community should very actively be thinking about how to increase the utility of the $DYDX token more broadly within the DeFi ecosystem. I think we did see a proposal on Commonwealth for the $DYDX token to be used on Bancor in the form of staking, which would encourage the community to actively participate in that discussion.

So far, I think on Discord I've seen some users ask about having $DYDX used as a form of collateral in other lending protocols like Aave or like Compound again, encourage any community members that are kind of interested in pursuing those to get involved with those communities and try to get kind of dYdX to have kind of increased utility within the broader DeFi ecosystem.

I think I've addressed most questions. Again, if anyone has any other questions, feel free to raise your hand or DM directly, we have about five more minutes left. Otherwise, we'll wrap up.

One more question that I received is, is there any chance to see Uniswap V3 LP tokens being accepted as collateral? At this time the current design of the layer two perpetual protocol is that there can only be one form of collateral, which at this time is $USDC. So, there's no, probably no potential for other forms of collateral to be added at this time. I think one of the exciting features that Everett mentioned around the 0x API will allow users to deposit and withdraw other ERC 20 tokens to the protocol in a more streamlined fashion. So, while all perpetual contracts will continue to be settled and margined in $USDC, that on and off-ramp, friction will be greatly reduced once the 0x API integration is live again.

Then I guess last question from a Community Member, will Antonio be speaking in future AMAs? It's a good question. You know, obviously Antonio's been super active on the Discord, as you can imagine the team is still small and, you know, it's a question of priorities. Antonio is fully committed to building the best product out there and to a certain extent his time is better used focused on the decentralization research, and a lot of the other initiatives that the team is driving.

I think Antonio has been very vocal on Twitter, and then has published content with kind of more specific details around a product roadmap. I think you can continue to see him be more active and certainly his DMs are always open, but we think that these community AMAs are better run by the Foundation team, as well as the dYdX Trading team. We're happy to bring him on when needed, but kind of for more of these frequent updates or Epoch reviews I think the current format that we have works well, but certainly welcome any feedback on how we could improve this going forward.

So, with that, we're at the hour mark. I want to thank everyone for joining us for the Epoch 3 review and community AMA. Great questions everyone. We've recorded the AMA and we'll be publishing a transcript on our blog. If any other questions come up, feel free to DM us, or post in on Discord and then stay tuned for claiming your dYdX rewards for Epoch 3, which will be commenced starting tomorrow. Thanks, everyone!