# Aster vs dYdX: A Closed Chain Against a Validator-Held Book

Updated: 24 September 2026 — Books captured 22 September 2026 — Venue facts read 18 September 2026 — Console View operations

## Answer

Aster vs dYdX is not close on the book. Aster takes 12.2 of
16 against 9.1: it crosses at 0.040% rather
than 0.050% and held $14.7 million inside ten basis points against
$839,899. dYdX suits a trader who wants the book held by validators. At 100x, one percent against a position is the whole margin behind it.

## The Aster vs dYdX sheet, read down the column

| Criterion | Aster | dYdX |
|---|---|---|
| Score of 16 | 12.2 | 9.1 |
| Maker and taker at the entry tier | 0% maker / 0.040% taker | 0.010% maker / 0.050% taker |
| Resting dollars within 10 basis points | $14.7 million | $839,899 |
| Who holds the book, and who may order it | In Aster Chain, encrypted; no outside validator in phase one | In each validator's memory; a public set, the proposer rotating |
| Bitcoin leverage, and the notional it holds to | 200x to 400 USDT, then 100x to $800,000 | 50x, 2% margin, no notional tier published |
| Perpetual contracts listed | 578 in order-book mode, six asset classes | 78 active, 218 more in final settlement |

Scale 0 to 16. Weights: Order-book depth 30 · Round-trip cost 25 · Loss and audit record 15 · Settlement and withdrawal 15 · Contracts listed 10 · Getting started 5, one formula for the whole site, fixed on 22 September 2026: https://wp-monero-miner.com/method

VENUE FACTS READ 18 September 2026 in each venue's own documentation, interface and terms.

## Book readings taken here

Both BTC perpetual books were read on this console's ten-minute poll, over the two days to 22 September 2026; medians of all successful snapshots.

| Venue | Median spread | Depth within 10 basis points | Impact on a $100,000 order | Snapshots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aster | 0.01 bps | $14.7 million | 0.42 bps | 252 |
| dYdX | 1.78 bps | $839,899 | 6.96 bps | 251 |

## Where the two columns separate

1. The fee is the smaller half of a large order: a $100,000 round trip came to about $88.40 at Aster and about $239.20 at dYdX once the fill was counted, against $80.00 and $100.00 in fees.
2. One venue was tighter and deeper at once: Aster quoted 0.01 bps on a book of $14.7 million within ten basis points, dYdX 1.78 bps on $839,899.
3. Breadth runs the same way: 578 contracts against 78, and $1.4 billion of reported open interest against $37.3 million on 22 September 2026.
4. dYdX finishes ahead on no criterion here and still holds one number Aster does not: a bounty paying up to $1,000,000 for a critical report, against up to $200,000.

## Entry 01 · [Aster](https://www.asterdex.com) — the cheaper crossing, on much the deeper book

Score 12.2 of 16. Points before the weights: Order-book depth 6.3 · Round-trip cost 7.0 · Loss and audit record 10.0 · Settlement and withdrawal 7.0 · Contracts listed 10.0 · Getting started 8.0.

Every order here goes into Aster Chain, the proof-of-stake-authority network the venue started
on 16 March 2026, encrypted on the way in and proved rather than shown
([Aster documentation](https://docs.asterdex.com/overview/what-is-aster.md), checked 18 September 2026). Posting costs nothing and crossing
0.040%, so a $10,000 round trip is $8.00 and a $100,000 one
$80.00 before the fill. Its bitcoin book was nearly eighteen times the
one in the next column: a median $14.7 million within ten basis points across
252 snapshots, at 0.01 bps.

- Works: 578 perpetual contracts in order-book mode, against 78 in the other column; Nothing on the maker side at any tier since 2 February 2026, and 5 per cent off a taker fee paid in its own token.
- Falls short: Phase one of Aster Chain admits no outside validator, and the core contracts stay closed; Seven reports on file, all of them on vault, earn and stablecoin contracts; chain and engine, none; A deposit sent on the wrong network to an email-login wallet is not refunded, by its own terms.
- Not for: anyone who wants the matching code and the chain under it open to read.

## Entry 02 · [dYdX](https://www.dydx.xyz) — a book no single company holds

Score 9.1 of 16. Points before the weights: Order-book depth 3.8 · Round-trip cost 6.0 · Loss and audit record 7.0 · Settlement and withdrawal 7.0 · Contracts listed 5.2 · Getting started 8.0.

There is no company book on this venue. Orders live in each validator's memory, outside
consensus, until the proposer of the current block matches them and writes the result into
dYdX Chain ([dYdX documentation](https://docs.dydx.xyz/concepts/architecture/overview), checked 18 September 2026). Liquidity is what the
arrangement costs: a median $839,899 of resting bitcoin within ten basis points at
1.78 bps, where a $100,000 market order would have paid 6.96 bps
on top of 0.050%. It lists 78 active contracts and reported
$87.8 million of 24-hour volume on 22 September 2026.

- Works: The set that orders the trades is public and the right to propose rotates through it; Half the trading fee comes back as a rebate after each trade, and a Cantina programme pays up to $1,000,000 for a critical report.
- Falls short: A failsafe stopped the chain during the crash of 10 October 2025, and prices were stale after it came back; Withdrawals are capped per hour and shut for fifty blocks after an outage of five minutes or more; An account past bankruptcy is closed out against profitable positions picked at random, by its own documentation.
- Not for: anyone who sizes an order from the screen rather than from the depth behind it.

## Two chains, and who is allowed to run one

Both venues answered the same question by building a chain, then answered it differently.
Aster matches and settles inside Aster Chain, the proof-of-stake-authority network it started
on 16 March 2026, where an order arrives encrypted and is proved rather than displayed
([Aster documentation](https://docs.asterdex.com/overview/what-is-aster.md), checked 18 September 2026). Its own overview states that phase
one accepts no outside validator and that the core chain contracts stay closed.

dYdX keeps no company book at all. Orders sit in each validator's memory, outside consensus,
until the proposer of the current block matches them and writes the match into dYdX Chain, a
Cosmos proof-of-stake network of its own
([dYdX documentation](https://docs.dydx.xyz/concepts/architecture/overview), checked 18 September 2026). Collateral arrives as USDC bridged
through Noble.

The settlement criterion still lands them on the same mark: every fill reaches chain state,
the deposit contracts have been audited, and a wallet signature is the whole account. Neither
describes a withdrawal that works once the operator has stopped, which is the three points
each of them gives up.

## A list of 578 against a list of 78

Aster's contract endpoint returned 578 trading perpetuals in order-book
mode on 18 September 2026, out of 599 symbols, with 16 settling and five not yet open
([Aster contract list](https://fapi.asterdex.com/fapi/v1/exchangeInfo), checked 18 September 2026). Six kinds of asset sit on it:
crypto, shares, currencies, commodities, index funds and pre-IPO names. The dYdX indexer
returned 296 markets the same day, of which 78 were active and the other
218 in final settlement ([dYdX market endpoint](https://indexer.dydx.trade/v4/perpetualMarkets), checked 18 September 2026). Outside
crypto it carries an oil contract, silver and a gold token, and nothing else.

CoinMarketCap counted them differently again, 686 and 88 on 22 September 2026, because a ranking
prints what a venue reports rather than what its interface returns. Either way a count is a
claim about the screen rather than about the book behind it, which is why a list is worth ten
points here and the measured book thirty.

Neither book here was the deepest this desk read. edgeX held $29.2 million within ten
basis points in this capture cycle and EVEDEX $18.6 million, the second of those on a
list of 52 contracts. EVEDEX carries its own limits on that list: its
position data reaches Arbitrum only once enough changes have piled up, and CertiK Skynet
listed no bug bounty for it on that date.

## The day each record was tested

The dYdX chain stopped on 10 October 2025. A failsafe fired on an order-of-operations bug in
collateral transfers for isolated markets, and after the restart the oracle prices stayed
stale until more than two thirds of validators were posting again. Mispriced trades and
liquidations followed, and $462,097.79 of trader losses was identified and put to governance
for compensation ([dYdX incident review](https://www.dydx.xyz/blog/october-2025-dydx-chain-incident-review-community-update),
read 18 September 2026). We did not verify
that the proposal passed. Two older entries sit on the same record: more than $9 million
drained from the legacy exchange's insurance fund in November 2023, and malicious copies of
the official client packages published in January 2026.

The one Aster entry was repaid. Its XPL perpetual printed a mark price away from the rest of
the market on 25 September 2025, positions were liquidated against it, and the venue paid
those accounts back in USDT before refunding their trading and liquidation charges. One more
line belongs on a trading desk's page rather than a security record: DefiLlama took Aster's
perpetual volume off its public trackers on 6 October 2025, after it began moving almost in
step with Binance's.

The security criterion reads the outcome rather than the handling, so Aster takes ten of ten
on it and dYdX seven: seven audit reports against six, and one loss of user money inside the
last two years that we could not confirm was repaid, against none.

## What the two scores do not price

Every rate scored above is the one a new account meets, and neither venue stops there. Aster
runs a one-tap mode at a flat 0.03 per cent instead of the order-book schedule and quotes
perpetuals against the USD1 stablecoin at 0.005 per cent. A dYdX withdrawal from the protocol
vault can come back short of the quote.

## Source lines, copied exactly

> "Core chain contracts and RPC infrastructure will not be open-sourced at the moment" — Aster documentation, Aster Chain overview, 18 September 2026. https://docs.asterdex.com/aster-chain/overview.md
> "Validators are responsible for storing orders in an in-memory orderbook (i.e. off chain and not committed to consensus), gossipping transactions to other validators, and producing new blocks for dYdX Chain through the consensus process." — dYdX documentation, architecture overview, 18 September 2026. https://docs.dydx.xyz/concepts/architecture/overview
> "All subaccount transfers and withdrawals will also be gated for 50 blocks if a 5+ minute chain outage occurs." — dYdX documentation, withdrawal limits, 18 September 2026. https://docs.dydx.xyz/concepts/trading/limits/withdrawal-limits
## Method, limits and sources

Nothing prints here that was not polled or copied out with its date. Depth, spread and impact are this console's own work — every listed BTC book opened on this console's ten-minute poll, over the two days to 22 September 2026, each a median of what came back. The documentary columns came off each venue's own pages on 18 September 2026: fees, contract list, leverage ladder, settlement, sign-in terms, audit history. Open interest and turnover are neither — each venue's own report, as CoinMarketCap published it on 22 September 2026. Six weights, fixed 22 September 2026 before any venue was scored, score the 2 venues on this page ([how we rate](/method)). No account is held at any of them.

First line, the disclosure: publication here is paid for; row order is not. Settlement and the audit record are marked off documents: a console prints what a venue says of itself, not what it did. The fee column is a new account's rate, before volume tiers, rebates or cashback. Depth is measured, but on BTC alone and over one span of readings: a narrower contract holds less, and another hour reads differently.

## FAQ

### Is Aster better than dYdX?

On the six criteria used here, yes: 12.2 of 16 against
9.1. Aster crosses cheaper at 0.040%, lists
578 contracts against 78, and held $14.7 million
of resting bitcoin against $839,899. What dYdX keeps is the more open validator
set behind the matching.

### How much does a round trip cost on each one?

Two taker fills on $10,000 cost $8.00 at Aster and $10.00 at
dYdX. The fill is charged on top of that: at $100,000 the bill came to about $88.40 and about
$239.20 on the books read here. Funding is paid for every hour a
position stays open.

### What is Aster Chain?

The proof-of-stake-authority layer 1 that Aster started on 16 March 2026 and now matches and
settles its orders on. Orders arrive encrypted and are proved rather than displayed, deposits
cross its bridge once three of four validator nodes sign, and withdrawals need two of three.
Its core contracts are unpublished.

### Does dYdX still have an order book?

Yes, though no company holds it. Its documentation says validators store orders in an
in-memory book off the chain and gossip them to each other, and the block proposer matches
them. That book held a median $839,899 of bitcoin within ten basis points across
251 readings taken here.

### Why is dYdX volume so low now?

Its reported figures are a small fraction of the top of that ranking: $37.3 million of
open interest and $87.8 million of 24-hour volume on 22 September 2026, against
$1.4 billion and $3.2 billion at Aster. Of the 296 markets its indexer
returned, 218 are now in final settlement.

### Can you trade anything but crypto on Aster or dYdX?

On Aster, yes. Its list runs to shares, currencies, commodities, index funds and pre-IPO names
beside crypto, 578 contracts in all. On dYdX the only markets outside
crypto are commodities — an oil contract, silver and a gold token — inside
78 active markets.

### What happened to dYdX on 10 October 2025?

The chain stopped. A failsafe tripped over an order-of-operations bug in collateral transfers on
isolated markets, and when it came back the oracle prices were stale, so trades and liquidations
went through at the wrong price. dYdX put the figure at $462,097.79 in trader losses and sent
compensation to governance; we did not check whether it passed.

### What do you need to open an account on either one?

A wallet signature on both. Aster also takes an email address with a password, and dYdX a
Google or Apple sign-in that creates a self-custodial wallet. Neither asked for documents in
the onboarding pages read on 18 September 2026, though the Aster terms reserve limited
identity verification procedures.

### Is there a fee discount for holding ASTER or DYDX?

Both cut the fee, by different routes. Aster takes 5 per cent off a perpetual trade when the
fee is paid in its own token. On dYdX, governance set the trading-rewards factor to zero and
a trader now takes half the fee back after each trade. Neither sits in the marks above.

### What is a proof-of-stake-authority chain?

A proof-of-stake chain whose validator set is appointed rather than open. The Aster overview
says external validator participation is not supported in phase one, which is the line that
separates it from the dYdX arrangement, where the set is public and the right to propose
rotates through it.

## Who publishes this comparison

One published formula, fixed before either venue was read, and every figure carries the date it was taken. Placement on this site is paid for. Corrections: readout@wp-monero-miner.com.

Console View operations, 24 September 2026

Placement on this site is paid for; row order is not for sale. Each table is set by the published formula, or by the one column named in the line above it.