The grant funds activities following the dYdX Chain Software Upgrade v9.0, approved through governance on 31 August 2025, which introduced a new capability: designated proposers, a governance-controlled subset of validators responsible for proposing blocks.

This grant will fund the deployment and ongoing maintenance of a custom ‘Connectivity’ node, with the goal of supporting advanced bandwidth and network connectivity on the dYdX chain. After launching the latest major upgrade, dYdX has seen a degradation in network performance and block production speeds (currently at 1.1 seconds, it used to be under 1 second). Our goal is to improve this connectivity issue by introducing an additional networking layer that improves gossiping and consensus across the majority of validators. The node will run specialized software meant exclusively for relaying messaging and improve the propagation of orders among validators. Validators will peer persistently with this node, guaranteeing that they always receive and send the latest chain updates.