Head to head · Exchange derivatives · October 2026 research run

dYdX vs Gate

dYdX scores 69.5 (B) on agent readiness against Gate's 56.4 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Gate leads on schema & documentation. Both do exchange derivatives.

Best crypto exchange APIs and MCP servers for AI agents · All 210 exchanges comparisons

Which one, for what

dYdX B

Best for An agent trading perpetuals from its own Cosmos wallet or through a permissioned key on an owner's account, outside the US, Canada and UK.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 83 against 42
  • Security & auth, 78 against 60
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 35
  • Maintenance & community, 83 against 77

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

No official MCP server; the one registry entry is a third party's analytics server

Gate C

Best for An agent trading spot, futures and earn products in a person's Gate account outside the 35 restricted locations, with a keyless MCP for research and an OAuth MCP or scoped key for trading.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 70 against 58

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

No status page, incident history or SLA; the terms give no uptime guarantee and cap liability at three months of fees

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Reliability dYdX +41

dYdX 83

Read with the hosted lines on the indexer API and the chain endpoints the clients submit to. status.dydx.trade is an Atlassian Statuspage with Frontends, dYdX Chain, Indexer, Order Gateway and Client Libraries components and an RSS history (20). From 1 August to 3 November 2026 the feed has eight items, seven scheduled maintenance windows of 29 minutes to 2 hours (indexer on 9 September, 8 and 15 October, protocol v9.7 on 11 September and v9.8.0 on 12 October, WebSocket compression on 26 and 28 October) and one degraded instant-deposit path through an onboarding partner from 24 to 29 September, outside the trading API. Clean or trivial (30). Rate limits documented with numbers for the indexer, the block limits and the public nodes (15). No 429 shape or Retry-After for the indexer; short-term orders expire by goodTilBlock and client IDs let an agent find an order after a timeout (8 of 15). No SLA (0). Mainnet generally available; the Order Entry Gateway is marked testnet-only (10). 20 + 30 + 15 + 8 + 0 + 10 = 83.

Gate 42

Graded with the hosted lines on the API v4 at api.gateio.ws with the hosted MCP beside it. No status page found (status.gate.com does not resolve, the docs link none), so 0 for the page and 5 for no readable history. Rate limits are published per endpoint group with numbers and fill-ratio rules (15). Every response carries X-Gate-RateLimit-Limit, X-Gate-RateLimit-Requests-Remain and X-Gate-RateLimit-Reset-Timestamp, 429 answers with the label TOO_FAST, and spot orders take a user text identifier, but no retry or idempotency guidance is written down (12 of 15). No SLA (0). API v4 and the MCP endpoints are production surfaces (10). 42.

Payments & pricing dYdX +25

dYdX 60

No machine payment protocol (0). Fees public per tier without login (20). Testnet with a faucet and no card anywhere (20). No signup; an agent with a funded wallet trades, subject to the geographic terms (20). Total 60.

Gate 35

No machine payment protocol (0). The fee page's table loads after login; help centre and learn articles give the VIP 0 spot rates (15 of 20). Market data over REST and the public MCP needs no account and no card (20). A person registers, verifies identity and mints the key or approves the grant in a browser (0). 35.

Security & auth dYdX +18

dYdX 78

Orders are signed by the account key or by a permissioned key the owner adds as an authenticator, limited by message type, subaccount and market with AllOf or AnyOf, and revoked by remove_authenticator; no shared secret and nothing in a URL (28 of 30). A key can be confined to placing and cancelling orders on one subaccount with withdrawals and transfers excluded, though not to a position or order size, and the interface's default API wallet trades all cross-margin pairs (16 of 20). The API returns no untrusted content (10). Every action is a chain transaction and the indexer lists fills, orders and transfers per subaccount, and authenticators can be listed; no per-key log (10 of 15). A Cantina bug bounty up to $1,000,000 sponsored by dYdX Trading Inc. over the protocol, indexer, web client and SDKs, an Informal Systems audit; no security.txt and no certification (14 of 20). Total 78.

Gate 60

Gate OAuth 2 for the hosted trading MCP with eight scopes per the protected-resource metadata and revocation on the API management page, and API keys with disabled, read-only or read-write per product group, a separate withdrawal group and an IP allow-list of 20 addresses (30). A read-only key and a GATE_READONLY switch exist, and the guide says fund-moving actions need the person's confirmation in the client, with no server-side cap documented (15 of 20). The news and info servers return third-party content with no guidance on treating it as untrusted (5 of 15). Key changes and OAuth grants are visible on the API management page; no per-call log found (5 of 15). No security.txt, no disclosure policy or bounty on a page we read, a proof-of-reserves repository (5 of 20). 60.

Schema & documentation Gate +12

dYdX 58

No OpenAPI file found for the indexer; the docs publish a types reference of about 200 pages (OrderSide, TimeInForce, OrderStatus and the rest) and the chain's protobuf messages are in the clients (8 of 25). llms.txt and Markdown docs (10). Endpoint pages describe each call and the guides say when to use short-term against long-term orders and the indexer against the node, but descriptions are short (12 of 20). Enums and types on every field in the reference, with pagination and cursor parameters typed (11 of 15). Examples in Python, TypeScript and Rust for each step; errors are described by HTTP status (400 malformed, 404 not found) with no code list (9 of 15). A /v4 path, protocol releases dated on the status page, deprecated rate-limit fields marked, but no API changelog (8 of 15). Total 58.

Gate 70

No public OpenAPI file was found, though the SDKs are generated and the MCP tools carry typed parameters per the tool reference; the hosted tools' JSON Schema could not be read without a session (12 of 25). The whole REST and WebSocket documentation is downloadable as Markdown and the agent guide is a plain page (10). The tool reference gives one line and the main parameters per tool, the API reference a description per endpoint, no when-not-to-use guidance (12 of 20). Required flags, enums for side, type and time_in_force (11 of 15). Examples per endpoint and a labelled error body with a fixed label list the docs tell you to branch on instead of messages (13 of 15). A versioned changelog, v4.106.177 on 2 November 2026 (12 of 15, since entries are terse). 70.

Maintenance & community dYdX +6

dYdX 83

Read on the clients and the chain. v4-clients was pushed on 29 October 2026 and protocol v9.8.0 shipped on 12 October (30). Protocol v9.7 on 11 September, v9.8.0 on 12 October, v4-client-js tags 3.5.0 and 3.6.0, three or more in 90 days (20). A Discord, a help centre and 36 open issues on v4-clients whose replies couldn't be read (12 of 25). Official SDKs current, the TypeScript client at 3.6.0 and the Python client at 1.1.6 from February 2026 (12 of 15). CI workflows for lint, test, publish and audit, with trusted publishing and provenance on npm (9 of 10). Total 83.

Gate 77

Read as a hosted service with open-source MCP packages. The API changelog's latest entry is 2 November 2026 and gate-skills was pushed 3 November (30). 40 dated changelog entries since 5 August 2026 (20). developer@gate.com, a help centre and issue trackers on gate-mcp and gate-skills, replies not checked (12 of 25). In the official MCP registry under io.github.gateio-dev, a GitHub namespace rather than gate.com, and official SDKs current (10 of 15). The local package has a publish workflow and no test workflow in CI, and its last tag is 16 April 2026 (5 of 10). 77.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this rundYdXGateEdge
Reliability16%208342dYdX +41
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.25870Gate +12
Agent ergonomics13%16.26666even
Security & auth14%17.57860dYdX +18
Payments & pricing10%12.56035dYdX +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88377dYdX +6
Transparency & trust7%8.85049dYdX +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 69.5/100C 56.4/100

Facts side by side

FactdYdXGate
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendordYdX Trading Inc.Gate
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.gatemcp.ai/mcp
TransportsStreamable HTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
x402nono
LicenceThe clients are AGPL-3.0 with a use condition tied to the v4 Terms of Use; the chain software (dydxprotocol/v4-chain) carries a custom licence GitHub cannot classify. The hosted indexer at indexer.dydx.trade and the front end are run by third parties, not dYdX Trading Inc.none
Tools exposed058
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesno
MCP registrynot listedio.github.gateio-dev/gate-mcp
Last release2026-10-292026-11-02
Terms last updated2026-03-122026-07-22
Privacy policy last updated2025-06-06no date given
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyesyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesyes
Popularity119 stars, 86k npm/wk44 stars

Verdicts

dYdX

dYdX gives an agent keyless indexer reads, permissioned keys limited by message type, subaccount and market, a Statuspage with a clean 90 days, published fees and a testnet with a faucet. There is no official MCP server or OpenAPI file, orders are chain transactions signed by the clients, and no one entity operates the hosted endpoints.

Gate

Gate runs official hosted MCP servers with keyless market data and OAuth-scoped trading, a local stdio server with a read-only switch, per-endpoint rate limits with headers and a futures testnet. There is no status page, SLA or OpenAPI file, the fee table needs a login, the MCP host is a separate domain, and the terms name no company.

Before you call either

dYdX

  1. Ask the account owner for an authenticator limited to /dydxprotocol.clob.MsgPlaceOrder and MsgCancelOrder on one subaccount, and keep its private key out of prompts
  2. Set a unique 32-bit clientId on every order and look it up on /v4/orders after a timeout; short-term orders expire with goodTilBlock (at most 20 blocks ahead)
  3. Stay under 2 stateful orders a block and 20 per 100 blocks; failed placements count, so use short-term orders for active trading
  4. Enable permessage-deflate on the indexer WebSocket; since 26 October 2026 connections without compression may be refused with 426
  5. Check /v4/geo and the compliance screen before trading for a person, since the terms exclude the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom

Gate

  1. Start on https://api.gatemcp.ai/mcp for prices and order books with no credential; switch to /mcp/exchange only when the person has approved the OAuth grant with the narrowest scopes
  2. For a key-based route, create a key on a dedicated sub-account with read-only on every group but the one the task needs, withdrawal disabled and an IP allow-list; changes take up to 5 minutes
  3. Put a unique text value starting with t- on every spot order and reuse it on the retry; read the order back before placing again
  4. Read X-Gate-RateLimit-Requests-Remain and stop at zero; spot order placement is capped at 10 a second and withdrawals at 1 per 3 seconds
  5. Rehearse futures logic on api-testnet.gateapi.io with TestNet keys; there is no spot testnet

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, dYdX or Gate?

dYdX scores 69.5 (B) on agent readiness against Gate's 56.4 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Gate leads on schema & documentation.

Do dYdX and Gate need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call dYdX and Gate without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for dYdX. Gate has a hosted endpoint at https://api.gatemcp.ai/mcp.

Are dYdX and Gate open source?

dYdX is open source (The clients are AGPL-3.0 with a use condition tied to the v4 Terms of Use; the chain software (dydxprotocol/v4-chain) carries a custom licence GitHub cannot classify. The hosted indexer at indexer.dydx.trade and the front end are run by third parties, not dYdX Trading Inc.). No open-source release is listed for Gate.

Other comparisons with dYdX or Gate

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