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Biography:
Antonio Juliano is an American software engineer and founder of decentralized exchange dYdX. After obtaining a computer science degree at Princeton University in 2015, Antonio started working at Coinbase as a software engineer, where he learned about cryptocurrency and the world of blockchain. He was fascinated by the new technology, especially after listening to some of the most prominent people in the space give talks at Coinbase, such as Vitalik Buterin and Polychain Capital founder Olaf Carlson-Wee. Hearing them talk about smart contract implementation and gas usage on Ethereum got him excited about what could be built on blockchain technology.
After only one year at Coinbase, he was ready to start his own business while still working as a software engineer for Uber. He first set up a search engine for the decentralized web called Weipoint. The project did not get much traction, and he later mentioned that it only had as little as 10 users overall. However, he learned a few lessons from the experience, including the importance of timing when launching a product exceeding even that of its use case.
Soon, he realized the value in building something on Ethereum that could bring some innovation to the decentralized finance sector. Thus, he started working on dYdX, following the framework of decentralized spot exchanges Kyber and Ox and adding derivatives on top of their offerings. In 2017, dYdX was launched, and it soon became one of the fastest-growing decentralized exchanges internationally.
Juliano’s 2021:
In the span of just a few months after starting dYdX, Juliano brought the company to average roughly $2 billion in daily trading volume, compared to Coinbase’s daily trading volume of $5 billion. At the beginning of 2021, dYdX raised a $10 million Series B round led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital, with new investors onboard including Wintermute, Hashed and RockTree Capital joining previous investors A16z and Polychain Capital.
In April, dYdX launched layer-2 cross-margin perpetuals to allow investors to trade with zero gas costs, lower trading fees and reduced minimum trade sizes. The platform further announced raising a $65 million Series C round led by crypto and Web3 investment firm Paradigm in June.
In the first nine months of 2021, the company recorded $75 million in revenue and is believed to have reached $125 million in revenue throughout the whole year, with $80 million in net profit.
Juliano’s 2022:
Currently, the exchange is a hybrid decentralized exchange, meaning that most components are decentralized, but some are run on servers controlled by dYdX Trading Inc. and other partners. In 2022, the challenge for dYdX will be to completely decentralize, as announced by the company’s CEO. The top priority will be to release its v4, the next version of the protocol, by the end of the year, which is expected to operate without any central components.
The company’s mission is for dYdX v4 to be open-source, decentralized and entirely controlled by the community. The company is also exploring adding additional benefits to the exchange, such as spot, margin and other synthetic trading products, improved experience with margining and collateralized options, and the addition of new trading markets.