As China cracks down on crypto declaring virtual currency-related business activities, including the provision of services by overseas exchanges to Chinese residents through the Internet to be “illegal financial activities,” decentralized finance (DeFi) is gaining a lot of traction in the country.

One DeFi project, in particular, is enjoying increased activity; decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX.

“China's strong regulatory policy may benefit DeFi applications such as MetaMask and dYdX,” said Wu Blockchain as it noted, “A large number of Chinese users will flood into the DeFi world… All Chinese communities are discussing how to learn defi.”

Saw lots of people on WeChat are talking about ape ftt and dydx

— Molly (@bigmagicdao) September 26, 2021

In the last 24 hours, dYdX perpetual recorded more than $6.5 billion in trading volume, according to Coingecko. With these numbers, dYdX has outperformed the popular centralized crypto exchange BitMEX, which saw $1.69 billion in volume and has reached closer to FTX and Bybit, seeing just over $8.5 billion each.

In terms of open interest, dYdX is in 14th place with $483 million in OI compared to Binance Futures’ more than $8.23 billion, which sits in first place and records $56.7 billion in volume.

Late on Sunday, dYdX founder Antonio Juliano shared on Twitter that five years ago, he left leading US crypto exchange Coinbase to eventually found dYdX, and now for the first time, his platform is “doing more trade volume than Coinbase.”

Coinbase, which is a spot exchange, recorded $3.1 billion in volume.

super impressive growth from the dydx team on this

it's about as gas-expensive as a CEX because you take 1 layer 1 step to get into starkex to then trade (a point @bharathrao has made for competitor @Leverj_io too ) https://t.co/VUTXXUhLz5

— Austerity Sucks (@austerity_sucks) September 25, 2021

Besides China turning to decentralized exchanges, this growing volume could also be driven by all the hype going around the platform usage, creating a feedback loop and the liquidity mining programs currently underway.

Users who trade on the exchange get to earn tokens through this program. Token rewards are based on the total fees paid and OI on the dYdX exchange. The first epoch of this reward incentive program ends on Sept 28, and there are currently just over 3.8 million DYDX tokens worth more than $86.3 million in this reward pool for distribution.

Given that the value of the DYDX token is on the rise, this further fuels this frenzy of activity on the platform.

Up more than 91.5% since the weekend, the DYDX token today hit a new all-time high at $22.56 thanks to growing usage.

Launched earlier this month, the governance token which was airdropped to its users and for which United States’ users were not eligible is currently worth $100,000.

Currently, DYDX has a market cap of about $1.1 billion based on the circulating supply of 50.855 million DYDX, out of the 1 billion total supply.

Amidst the ongoing dYdX mania, the crypto community got to know that all the trading fees earned on the platform go to the dYdX Trading Inc. Equity holders of the DyDx Foundation actually earn a percentage of the revenues generated by the exchange.

Also, the token holders can’t vote for the fees to be shared among them because, according to the team, “trading fees aren’t part of the smart contracts owned by the token.” And there are no plans to do any token burns either.

In the past 7-days, dYdX earned $12.55 million in revenue, the fourth-largest, and $29 million in the past 30 days.

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