Author: Shenchao TechFlow
Shenchao Introduction:Centered on token economics and validator governance, the perpetual contract protocol dYdX's official platform has reached a governance milestone. The Staking Programme Period 7 Review Report published on the official forum shows that the Treasury SubDAO completed a staking restructuring of approximately 25.87 million tokens.
In this round of adjustments, approximately 10.72 million tokens previously purchased through open-market buybacks participated in delegation for the first time, pushing the Treasury's total delegated amount from 90.04 million tokens to approximately 101 million tokens, officially breaking through the 100 million token mark.
The review follows Governance Proposal No. 396. With the active validator set streamlined to 21, the Treasury introduced a reverse dependency control and governance voting trade-off mechanism, reducing the weight of validators that recently abstained or did not vote, resulting in the direct zeroing of delegations to 5 well-known validators and restructuring the application chain ecosystem.
Treasury Delegation Breaks 100 Million: Buyback Funds Enter and a 25 Million Token Migration
Tracing the capital flows in this review round, the restructuring scale reached a new stage high. The Treasury SubDAO executed 25 atomic transactions on-chain, mobilizing a cumulative 25,873,915 DYDX tokens, accounting for a significant share of the network's circulating supply.
The funding sources consist of two parts. Approximately 10,719,308 tokens came from the previously executed community buyback program, representing entirely new incremental capital formally injected into the staking network for the first time; the remaining approximately 15,154,607 tokens were reallocated and migrated from existing stakes.
After the new capital injection, the total delegated amount across the Treasury's three core addresses climbed from the previous 90,041,355 tokens to 100,760,663 tokens. The Treasury has officially established a staking base pool of over 100 million tokens, becoming the cornerstone for consolidating the consensus security of dYdX Chain.
In implementing the capital migration, all existing tokens were executed through Cosmos' native Redelegation mechanism, with assets remaining in a locked, interest-accruing state throughout the entire transfer process.
This seamless switching method completely avoided the tens-of-days unbonding waiting period typical of traditional PoS networks, not only incurring no interest interruption losses but also avoiding the consensus volatility risks to the underlying network caused by capital going offline.
Chain Reaction of Proposal No. 396: Twenty-One Active Seats and Decentralization Constraints
The underlying institutional driver of this major migration stems from Proposal No. 396, which took effect on September 17. The proposal streamlined the active validator set from 31 to 21, aiming to improve peer-to-peer communication efficiency and block generation speed.
The seat reduction triggered a cliff-edge drop in staking yields on-chain. Approximately 8.34 million tokens previously delegated by the Treasury fell directly into the hands of losing validators removed from the active set, causing this portion of capital to idle with zero rewards.
Faced with this capital sedimentation problem, the Treasury established two ironclad allocation rules. The primary principle is strictly limiting validators' single-point dependence on Treasury funds.
To prevent individual validators from relying on the official Treasury to form voting power oligopolies, the Treasury set a hard cap on the proportion of official delegation a single validator can absorb. Newly released shares are allocated inversely proportional to Treasury dependency.
This means that high-quality independent validators with strong ability to attract community retail delegations and low dependence on official support received more generous additional rewards. The mechanism forces validators toward market-based competition, effectively preventing distortion of the decentralized ecosystem.
Governance Assessment Draws the Sword: Abstainers and Non-Voters Lose Weight, Five Validators' Delegations Zeroed
The second heavy hammer wielded by the staking review is a comprehensive increase in the weighting of governance participation in assessments. In PoS chains, validators are not merely block-producing servers but trustees carrying decentralized governance decisions.
In the past, some validators long abstained from or were absent from voting on key community proposals. The Treasury explicitly announced that validators who recently abstained or did not vote on proposals would have their Treasury delegation quotas systematically reduced.
This governance red line directly triggered a validator reshuffle. On-chain data shows that a total of 5 validators—Interstellar, Luganodes, Silk Nodes, Citadel.one, and DELIGHT—had their delegations zeroed, each deducted 1.5 million to 1.96 million shares.
The established wallet validator Keplr was likewise deducted 4,344,884 tokens for failing to meet governance assessment standards, with its retained amount dropping to 766,749 tokens; validator Meria also had its quota reduced by 425,406 tokens.
The freed-up tokens were redirected to active validators. AutoStake gained 3.6 million in additional delegation, Allnodes received 3.38 million more, and CLC, TTT VN, Crosnest, and Bitwise's validator all received boosts of over two million tokens each.
According to data from the Mintscan block explorer, as of block height 110,578,640, the above adjustments have been settled and completed. With staking scale breaking 100 million and 21 curated validators operating steadily, dYdX has set a benchmark for application chain capital efficiency and governance coordination.
