Chaos Labs Announces Season 9 of the Surge Program
Chaos Labs is releasing the updated structure for Season 9 of the Surge Program, focused on supporting sustainable trading activity on dYdX. Season 9 will run from 00:00 UTC on 1 December to 23:59 UTC on 31 December 2025.
Key Changes for Season 9
50% Fee Rebate
All traders (maker + taker, API and UI) will continue to receive 50% rebates on positive trading fees through the end of the year.
No Fees on SOL and BTC
Trading on SOL and BTC markets will remain fee-free, provided the dYdX community votes again in favor of fee-free trading on these markets for December.
UI Trader Reward Update
Starting this season, the $1,000,000 UI trader reward pool will be removed and will no longer be active in Season 9.
30 Day TWAP Methodology
The program will continue to use a 30-day TWAP for calculating reward amounts. The TWAP will run over the 30 days leading up to the last day of the season.
Anti Wash Trading Measures
To protect legitimate traders and maintain program integrity, Chaos Labs will continue to use its wash trading detection systems to monitor activity. The team is committed to taking decisive action against fraudulent or manipulative behavior in order to maintain fair reward distribution for genuine participants.
This is definitely the wrong decision for a number of reasons
Canceling the 1M reward in the final season is not a sound decision at all, especially since this is the last season.
The first reason is that the Surge program is the least costly and the most efficient in increasing the platform’s trading volume and attracting new new traders compared to the other reward programs.
The second reason is that since this is the final season, it would be better to allocate rewards greater than 1M as a strong closing for the program, rather than canceling the 1M reward.
I also suggest keeping the BTC and SOL fees instead of removing them.
If the team thinks that the rewards in dydx after selling put pressure in the price , so this is the main reason for canceling the 1M reward , you could give the rewards in USDC (the token we are paying as fee) . So think about this because the season 9 it will be a surge season without surge
Here is why the removal of $1M UI trader reward pool not appropriate at this time:
The Market Is Becoming Massively More Competitive — Incentives Are Increasing Everywhere
Right now the perps DEX market is in one of the most competitive cycles in years.
Almost every major protocol is aggressively increasing incentives, not removing them. The entire market is fighting for traders via incentives.
=> Cutting the $1M incentive now directly weakens dYdX during a period of hyper-competition for user attention and liquidity.
UI traders represent the healthiest and most sustainable segment of the dYdX ecosystem: they are the highest-margin users, the strongest driver of organic growth, the most loyal to the platform’s brand. If incentives disappear at this moment, this segment will naturally migrate toward platforms offering better incentive programs.
=> This outflow would create a structural decline in UI trading share, weakening the long-term stability of the ecosystem
As one of the most loyal users of DYDX for over a year, I hope the community will consider continuing the $1M trading reward pool for Season 9.
removing reward for UI Trader is a bad decision. Due to this if user moved to another platform then there is rare chnaces that they will be back. Most of the DEX offer incentives to traders. I think UI trading rewards should not be removed at the end of surge but it should increase to make the Surge more famous. Also I heard that dydx will let the community members vote to choose the best decision. I hope this proposal will be rejected.
I completely agree. Removing UI rewards at this stage risks pushing loyal users away, and once they move to competitors, it’s extremely hard to bring them back.
@chaoslabs I have to get an explanation for this, this thing happened in the previous season, and when I asked for help and made several complaints, I was not interacted with, but this time it can’t be silenced, you have to take this seriously.
The rewards on the last day decrease by the amount of the fees paid and then you consider the estimated rewards to be the amount of the full rewards including refund The fee doesn’t have to happen like in the previous season it was a process like scams Can you explain to me why the amount of the estimated rewards decreased in just 20 seconds and this decrease was the same 50% of the total fees paid
I don’t know if this was intentional or unintentional but this time you have to get clarification as you can’t consider the estimated rewards to be the total rewards as happened in the previous season
Removing the $1M UI reward pool is a strategic mistake that introduces more risk than value, especially in the current competitive environment:
UI Traders Lose All Economic Relevance, compared to API
Removing the $1M UI reward pool effectively eliminates any meaningful benefit for casual and mid-size UI traders. The remaining incentives disproportionately favor large API operators who can extract far more value from fee rebates. This shifts the program away from broad participation and turns it into a system where only high-frequency actors benefit, undermining the inclusivity and sustainability of trader activity.
Reduced Trader Diversity Hurts Market Quality
UI traders contribute discretionary, human-driven flow that balances algorithmic liquidity. Removing incentives for this group pushes dYdX toward a homogenized market dominated by bots, reducing orderbook resilience and market quality during volatility. Volume alone cannot compensate for the loss of behavioral diversity.
Season 9 Becomes Overly Concentrated
Without the UI pool, Season 9 becomes heavily skewed toward whales and API desks. This concentration of rewards undermines decentralization, weakens the broader community of traders, and contradicts the goal of distributing value across a wide user base. A reward system that only benefits a narrow group increases long-term churn.
With new L2 perps exchanges and large incentive campaigns launching in early 2026, this is the worst possible time to weaken UI retention. Once UI traders migrate to competitor platforms offering stronger incentives, they are unlikely to return. Removing rewards now risks losing traders precisely when competition is about to intensify. I strongly urge the community to reconsider this change before it creates long-term damage that will be far more costly to reverse.
So-called UI traders with hundreds of deals within 7-9 seconds each are just bounty hunting. Regular UI traders would be happy to get a flat 50% fee discount with no programs.
And yes, retail users just switch to another platrorm. They don’t QQ on forums on how awesome the last insane tokens distribution was.
Hey, for anyone confused about the frontend rewards, while the $1M frontend pool was removed for Season 9, the community has launched a up to $1M pool for liquidation rebates.
You can find the forum post with more details here and the Mintscan gov prop link here.
The leaderboard is available under the “Rebate” tab in dydx.trade.
