How to track dYdX positions and PnL
On dYdX v4 the account is an address, so positions, fills and funding are public data. What to watch and where subaccounts hide exposure.
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 that eventually has to survive contact with a tax form.
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 means 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 and Lighter by address, 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.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an API key to track dYdX?
Not for v4. The account lives on the dYdX chain and is tied to your address, so positions, fills and funding are readable from the address alone.
Why do different dashboards show me different PnL?
They draw the line in different places: some include funding and fees in position PnL, some report them separately, and entry price after partial fills can be averaged differently. Comparing venues honestly needs one consistent definition applied to all of them.
Does my old dYdX v3 history carry over?
No. v3 was a separate system on Ethereum with its own accounts. If you need that history for taxes, export it separately; v4 tracking starts from the new chain.
Terms in this article
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