Author: Shenchao TechFlow
DeepChain Summary: Around token economics and node governance, the dYdX perpetual contracts protocol platform has welcomed governance nodes. The official forum’s Staking Program Phase 7 Review Report shows that the Treasury SubDAO has completed a re-staking of approximately 25.87 million tokens.
During this adjustment, approximately 10.72 million tokens previously purchased through open market buybacks were delegated for the first time, increasing the total vault delegation from 90.04 million to about 101 million tokens, officially surpassing the 100-million mark.
Review follows Governance Proposal #396. With active validators streamlined to 21, the treasury has introduced reverse dependency controls and governance voting weight adjustments, reducing stakes for recent abstaining or non-voting nodes, resulting in zero direct delegations for five prominent validators and restructuring the application chain ecosystem.
Treasury delegation exceeds 100 million: Buyback funds enter the market alongside a 25-million-token migration
The fund flows from this round of review have been analyzed, with the restructuring scale reaching a new high for this phase. The Treasury SubDAO executed 25 atomic transactions on-chain, mobilizing a total of 25,873,915 DYDX tokens, representing a significant portion of the network’s circulating supply.
The source of funds consists of two parts. Approximately 10,719,308 tokens come from a previously executed community buyback program and represent the first official injection of new supply into the staking network; the remaining approximately 15,154,607 tokens are a redistribution and migration of existing staked tokens.
After the new capital injection, the total staked amount across the three core treasury addresses increased from 90,041,355 to 100,760,663 tokens. The treasury has officially established a staking base pool exceeding 100 million tokens, serving as a foundational pillar for the consensus security of dYdX Chain.
In the implementation of the fund migration project, all existing tokens are migrated using Cosmos's native redelegation mechanism, ensuring that assets remain locked and earning interest throughout the entire transfer process.
This seamless switching method completely eliminates the lengthy unstaking waiting period of traditional PoS networks, which can last dozens of days, preventing both interest income disruption and the consensus volatility risks caused by funds going offline on the underlying network.
Proposal No. 396 Ripple Effect: Twenty-One Active Seats and Decentralized Constraints
The underlying institutional driver of this mass migration stems from Proposal 396, which took effect on September 17. The proposal reduces the size of the active validator set from 31 to 21, aiming to enhance peer-to-peer communication efficiency and block generation speed.
The seat consolidation on-chain triggered a cliff in staking rewards. The approximately 8.34 million tokens previously delegated by the treasury directly fell into the hands of nodes removed from the active set, causing this portion of funds to enter a zero-reward idle state.
To address this capital stagnation issue, the treasury has established two fundamental allocation principles. The primary principle is to strictly limit validators' reliance on treasury funds.
To prevent individual nodes from forming a voting oligopoly by relying on the official treasury, a hard cap is set on the percentage of official delegation any single node can receive. Newly released shares are allocated inversely proportional to each node’s dependence on the treasury.
This means high-quality independent validators with strong capabilities in absorbing community retail delegations and low dependence on official support receive significantly higher additional rewards. The mechanism compels nodes to engage in market-driven competition, effectively preventing distortions to the decentralized ecosystem.
Governance evaluation takes effect: Abstentions and non-voters face reduced voting power; five node delegations reset to zero.
The second major measure introduced by the staking review is to significantly increase the weight of governance participation evaluations. In PoS blockchains, nodes are not merely block-producing servers, but also trustees responsible for decentralized governance decisions.
In the past, some validators consistently abstained from voting or failed to participate in critical community proposals. The treasury has clearly announced that systemically reduced treasury delegation quotas will be applied to nodes that abstained or did not vote on recent proposals.
This governance red line directly triggered a validator shuffle. On-chain data shows that five validators—Interstellar, Luganodes, Silk Nodes, Citadel.one, and DELIGHT—each experienced a complete reset of their delegations, with 1.5 to 1.96 million shares slashed from each.
The established wallet node Keplr had 4,344,884 tokens deducted due to failing governance evaluation, reducing its remaining balance to 766,749 tokens; the node Meria also had its allocation reduced by 425,406 tokens.
The released tokens have been redirected to active nodes. AutoStake secured 3.6 million additional delegations, Allnodes received 3.38 million additional delegations, and nodes operated by CLC, TTT VN, Crosnest, and Bitwise each received over 2 million additional delegations.
According to data from Mintscan blockchain explorer, as of block height 110,578,640, the aforementioned adjustments have been fully settled. With staking surpassing one billion and 21 selected nodes operating stably, dYdX has set a benchmark for capital efficiency and governance coordination on application chains.