Founder of largest decentralized derivatives exchange believes DeFi may soon see millions in new users

Episode 48 of Season 4 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Antonio Juliano, Founder & CEO of dYdX.

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In his last appearance on The Scoop, Antonio Juliano — founder and CEO of decentralized derivatives platform dYdX — was preparing to integrate StarkWare’s layer-2 scaling technology into the third iteration of the dYdX protocol.  

Just over a year later, dYdX has grown to dominate the decentralized derivatives space, with the majority of decentralized perpetual swap trading volume occurring on the platform, according to data from The Block.

In this episode of The Scoop, Antonio Juliano explains why his team remains undeterred by the global market drawdown as they work towards the upcoming dYdX v4 release, which will fully decentralize governance of the protocol.

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As Juliano said on the show, his long-term vision extends past market cyclicality:

“It’s really important for us to maintain that mentality of: the markets may go down, people may write us off to some level, but really what we’re building for is five years from now.”

While most “blue chip” DeFi tokens have fallen significantly from last year’s all-time highs, Juliano believes the recent trend of centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Robinhood providing users with streamlined access to Web3 platforms will provide an influx of new market participants to DeFi protocols.

As Juliano explained during the interview,

“It’s just going to be a huge magnifier and multiplier in terms of the types of people and the number of people that can interact with DeFi. I’m really excited about this — I’ve been excited about this narrative playing out for a while now. I thought it would probably take a little bit longer, to be honest than it did… but it’s something that that I’m really excited about and I think will be a huge multiplier for DeFi.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Juliano also discuss:

• Differences between centralized and decentralized financial systems
• Intricacies of decentralized protocol governance
• dYdX liquidity incentivization

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

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