dYdX is a non-custodial decentralized exchange, or DEX, that focuses on margin trading, derivatives, and lending in Ethereum’s rising decentralized finance sector.

Its builders’ pitch? To democratize powerful financial tools for the masses so that users anywhere, anytime can have the means to make advanced trades without being limited by locale or status.

According to tracker site DeFi Pulse, the platform is currently the 7th-largest project in DeFi. That’s not bad at all, but where dYdX has recently been putting up impressive numbers lately is in its share of the wider DEX market.

dYdX Usage Trending Up

Thanks to a new updated statistics page from Ethereum data dashboard Dune Analytics, we now know that the dYdX protocol accounted for anywhere from 29 percent to 44 percent of the entire market share of DEX activity on Ethereum over the last week.

Moreover, one can see from dYdX’s new Dune Analytics dashboard that the platform’s slice of the DEX market has been steadily up-trending since December 2019, when dYdX accounted for a market share as low as 3 percent.

Great dashboard by @DuneAnalytics & @tomhschmidt! Highlights:

– MAUs up almost 3x since January 📈

– dYdX at almost 40% DEX market share 🥇 https://t.co/qDOjYJxXwo — dYdX (@dydxprotocol) March 11, 2020

From the December low to the recent 44 percent high, then, is growth of more than 1,300 percent — an incline that suggests dYdX, which launched limit orders and a native ETH-DAI market last fall, is starting to gain early traction.

Per Dune Analytics, the exchange’s monthly and weekly active users, or MAUs and WAUs respectively, have been on the rise as well.

dYdX went from 471 MAUs back in January to 1,345 MAUs this week, for an increase of 185 percent. In the same span, the platform went from 202 WAUs to 757 WAUs, for an increase of 275 percent.

Dune Analytics is also in the process of adding dYdX’s stats to the site’s DEX tracker page, so soon users will be able to more readily track how the platform compares in the months ahead to other popular DeFi exchanges like Uniswap, Kyber Network, 0x, and Oasis.

New Daily Volume Record

Along with accounting for a sizable portion of all DEX activity this week, dYdX also just notably experienced its best day of volume yet.

That’s because on March 9th the DeFi margin and derivatives platform saw more than $17.75 million USD traded through its smart contracts intraday, a new activity milestone for the project.

dYdX has again broken its all-time high for trading volume with over $17.75M trades in the past day!! pic.twitter.com/a5CLlvy4is — dYdX (@dydxprotocol) March 9, 2020

The Coinbase Experiment

It isn’t surprising that dYdX has recently been ascending, at least considering some of the high-profile support it’s had along the way.

For one, the platform counts among its investors some of the crypto ecosystem’s biggest names, like Andreessen Horowitz, Dragonfly Capital, and Fred Ehrsam. Yet the decentralized exchange has been helped in more direct ways, too.

For example, last fall U.S. crypto exchange giant Coinbase announced the creation of a “USDC Bootstrap Fund” worth $2 million. Accordingly, Coinbase committed to providing 1 million USDC of liquidity directly into dYdX’s and Compound’s protocols, respectively. As the San Francisco-based “unicorn” startup explained at the time:

“Through the investment of USDC, our goal over time is to support DeFi teams in making their products safer, and more reliant and accessible than existing financial products. We view this as just one first step for how Coinbase will support DeFi. In the coming months, we’ll share our learnings and future integrations with the community.”

Now Connected to Kollateral

Flash loans, which allow users to take out a DeFi loan and pay it back within a single transaction, have exploded onto the scene this year. And now Kollateral, a new flash loan liquidity aggregator project, is sourcing liquidity from dYdX. It’s a clear indication of the exchange’s growing utility in the ecosystem.

“Kollateral handles aggregating liquidity from multiple flash-loan-enabled pools such as dYdX and Aave,” the project’s Docs page reads.