How to track dYdX positions and PnL

dYdX made the most radical architecture bet of the big perp venues: instead of living on someone else’s chain, it became one. The practical consequence for tracking is friendly. Your account is an address on the dYdX chain, and everything attached to it, positions, orders, fills, funding, transfers, is public data that a tracker can read without keys, logins or permissions.

One protocol, two generations

The dYdX most people trade today is v4, a standalone chain built with the Cosmos SDK where validators run the order book and settlement happens on-chain. The previous generation, v3, ran as a StarkEx layer 2 on Ethereum with its own accounts. If you traded both, they are separate venues from a tracking point of view: different addresses, different histories, and old v3 activity does not follow you to the new chain.

The numbers worth watching

• Open perpetual positions with entry price, mark price and liquidation price. Distance to liquidation is the number that decides how well you sleep.
• Free collateral against used margin. USDC is the collateral asset, so this is one number, which is refreshingly easy to reason about.
• The funding each position pays or earns. On a position held for weeks it quietly becomes a first-order term in the PnL.
• Realized PnL from closed fills, the figure a tax return may eventually ask about.

Subaccounts hide exposure

dYdX lets one address split collateral into subaccounts, and strategies often do: one for the directional book, one for a hedge, one for experiments. Each subaccount shows its own tidy dashboard, which can mean no single screen in the venue shows what the address as a whole is carrying. Summing exposure and PnL across subaccounts is exactly the kind of arithmetic a tracker should do for you, every time, without being asked.

The cross-venue problem, again

Very few people trade dYdX alone. There is a Hyperliquid account, maybe Lighter, maybe GMX positions left on Arbitrum, and each venue defines PnL a little differently. The number that matters at the end of the week, total exposure and honest PnL across all of them, only exists if something aggregates the venues with one definition.

Reading it in TrueHold

dYdX keeps its own dashboard for the venue side. TrueHold covers the rest of the book: Hyperliquid by address, Lighter by read-only token, exchange futures by read-only key, spot and DeFi across 180+ chains, one exposure number and one PnL. When your perps live on more than one venue, that total is the number that keeps risk honest.

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