Hyperliquid vs dYdX for Trading Competitions

Hyperliquid and dYdX are both decentralised perpetuals venues, both listed in the venues directory as perpetual markets, and both listed at the same base fee tier — 0.02% maker, 0.05% taker. On paper they are close substitutes.

For running a competition they are not, and the reason has almost nothing to do with fees or liquidity. It is about identity: on one venue your wallet is your account, and on the other it is not.

The one-line difference

Hyperliquid needs your wallet. dYdX needs your wallet plus a linked dYdX address.

Hyperliquid runs on its own L1 with a fully on-chain order book, and the Hyperliquid address is the EVM wallet you already connected. Scoring reads that address's fills and open positions from the public /info endpoint. There is no key, no OAuth, no credential of any kind in the path.

dYdX trades on its own chain, with an account address that is not your EVM wallet. Voltrade's dYdX sync loads a competition's participants and skips every one whose dydxAddress is null or empty. Linking is not an optional profile enhancement on dYdX; it is the difference between being scored and being invisible.

Everything below is downstream of that.

Side by side

Two of those rows deserve unpacking.

The cadence gap is not arbitrary. Hyperliquid's job runs four times as often because it scores PnL, and a PnL leaderboard moves with the mark price rather than only with new fills — an untouched open position changes value continuously. A volume leaderboard only moves when someone trades, so 20 minutes is enough resolution for dYdX.

The settlement windows differ for the same reason in reverse. Hyperliquid keeps scoring for 6 hours after a competition ends, with the final pass clamping the window to the end time so late fills cannot rewrite a settled result. dYdX's job continues discovering recently-ended competitions for 30 hours, because each day bucket stays open for 3 hours past its own end and a competition that ends near the start of its final period needs a long outer bound to finish closing.

The entry-friction trade-off

This is the real decision, and it cuts both ways.

Hyperliquid's zero-friction entry means a competitor goes from "interested" to "registered" in one wallet connection. No account creation on a second site, no address to find and paste, no failure mode where someone registers and then quietly scores nothing because they never completed a step. For a competition whose success depends on turnout, that matters more than most sponsors expect.

dYdX's linking requirement is a filter, and filters are not purely bad. Someone who finds and links their dYdX address is someone who has a dYdX account and intends to use it. What you lose in raw registration count you partly get back in the share of registrants who actually trade. The failure mode is at least a loud one: an unlinked wallet cannot register at all. The join endpoint checks for a linked dYdX address on a dYdX competition and rejects with a 400 telling the trader exactly what is missing, so nobody ends up on the board scoring a silent zero. What you lose is upstream of that — the people who bounce off the linking step and never register. If you run a dYdX competition, the linking prompt is the single highest-leverage piece of communication you will send.

What each is actually good for

Hyperliquid is the platform's cleanest PnL venue. Challenge scoring needs realized PnL, unrealized PnL on open positions and cumulative volume per participant, and one unauthenticated endpoint provides all three. The engine applies a flat-at-start gate, cumulative volume brackets, max-cap pro-rata on realized PnL, an unrealized snapshot pro-rata and a minimum-volume eligibility check, then ranks by absolute total PnL. Participants who held positions at the start and never went flat, or who finished under the volume minimum, remain visible on the board but are excluded from payout.

dYdX is a volume venue with genuinely good market controls. Market filters and market type are read from the competition record rather than configured per job, so a competition can be scoped to specific pairs without a code change. The directory lists its top pairs as BTC-USD, ETH-USD, SOL-USD, DOGE-USD and AVAX-USD, and describes the venue as offering leverage across a wide perpetual market list on the dYdX Chain. If your campaign is about driving turnover into named markets, that scoping is the feature.

The agent angle

Worth a paragraph because it is an unusual asymmetry.

Voltrade's agent API lets an autonomous agent self-register with nothing but a wallet signature. Under that model, dYdX is the one linked-account venue an agent can reach — the registration endpoint accepts a dydxAddress in the body, so an agent that controls a dYdX account can pass it and be scored. Hyperliquid competitions, despite being wallet-only for humans, return a 422 unsupported_campaign to the agent registration path.

That is worth knowing if you are building an autonomous competitor. The details are in build an agent that joins competitions.

Fees, honestly

Both venues sit at 0.02% maker / 0.05% taker in our catalog. The Hyperliquid entry is explicitly annotated as a base tier that is volume-scaled and subject to change; the dYdX entry carries no such note but the same caution applies, since fee schedules on both venues are tiered by activity.

We link the venues directory rather than freeze numbers in prose for a specific reason: on a volume competition, the competitors who matter most to the result are the ones paying least, and a headline tier describes none of them well. Treat catalog fees as a starting point, not a quote.

Choosing between them

• Scoring profit? Hyperliquid. The data model fits the format.
• Scoring turnover in specific markets? dYdX, for the filtering — or Hyperliquid if you would rather not ask anyone to link anything.
• Optimising for turnout? Hyperliquid. Every removed step is registrations you keep.
• Optimising for qualified participation? dYdX. The link is a filter that selects for intent.
• Running an autonomous agent? dYdX is reachable with a linked address; Hyperliquid is not.

Volume competitions on both venues are admin-launched: permissionless creators — humans in the wizard and agents on the API alike — are restricted to on-chain pool tracking, so a venue volume competition is arranged through Voltrade. PnL challenges are asymmetric. Hyperliquid is one of the two venues in the supported challenge set and challenge creation runs before the restricted-creator gate, so anyone can launch a Hyperliquid challenge; dYdX is not in that set yet, so it stays admin-only in both formats. Start at the launch page.

Deeper single-venue detail lives in Hyperliquid competitions and dYdX competitions. For the format question underneath the venue question, read volume vs PnL competitions.