Here’s How Whales Navigated dYdX’s 150M Token Unlock

Several crypto projects have unlocked significant amounts of tokens, with dYdX, a decentralized exchange, leading the way by unlocking 150 million tokens. This represented 30% of the tokens allocated to investors, founders, and current and future employees, and the unlocking occurred on December 1st.

DYDX – the native cryptocurrency of the dYdX chain – experienced a decline of only 2%.

Whales in Action

Following the latest token unlock, three whale accounts, which received a portion of these unlocked tokens from the dYdX Foundation Wallet, have proceeded to transfer their allocated tokens for sale on Binance.

The first wallet, identified as “0xD21B,” transferred 5.63 million DYDX, worth $17.73 million, to Binance and currently retains a balance of 9.78 million DYDX, valued at $30.9 million.

The second wallet, “0x63C6,” transferred 793,286 DYDX, equivalent to $2.5 million, to the crypto exchange and possessed 1.85 million DYDX, worth $5.85 million. The third – “0xa70d” – transferred 391,036 DYDX (worth $1.23 million) to Binance and has 2.39 million DYDX, valued at $7.54 million, left.

According to data compiled by Lookonchain, these three large wallets collectively moved 6.81 million DYDX tokens, valued at $21.46 million, to Binance. Despite the mild selling pressure, the on-chain intelligence platform revealed that some investors have bridged DYDX.

Traditionally, token unlocks are viewed as bearish events due to the sudden increase in the token supply. Surprisingly, dYdX’s price has not experienced a significant decline following this unlocking event.

This influx of DYDX tokens on the exchange has exerted a slight downward pressure on its value, causing a temporary dip to $3.08. However, the price quickly rebounded to $3.18 within less than 24 hours. Despite this, the trading volume decreased by 5%, dropping from $541k to $511k during the same period.

dYdX’s Transition to Standalone Blockchain

The decentralized crypto derivatives exchange released the open-source code for its upcoming version 4 in October. The new dYdX Chain, built on the Cosmos SDK and leveraging the Tendermint Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, is anticipated to facilitate transactions at a rate of up to 2,000 per second.

The move to integrate Cosmos into its version 4 represented the initial phase of the upgrade, signifying the DEX’s shift from the Ethereum layer-2 network to its dedicated independent blockchain.