June 15, 2021

dYdX Closes $65M Series C

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dYdX Closes $65M Series C

We’re excited to announce that dYdX has raised a $65M Series C round led by Paradigm!

We also welcome many new top-tier strategic investors, including:

  • Liquidity Providers: QCP Capital, CMS Holdings, CMT Digital, Finlink Capital, Sixtant, Menai Financial Group, MGNR, Kronos Research
  • Crypto VCs: HashKey, Electric Capital, Delphi Digital
  • Partners: StarkWare

Additionally, we’re grateful for the continued support from past investors a16z, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Wintermute, and many others who also participated in this round.

This is an important milestone for the dYdX team. The additional capital allows us to maintain a long-term focus and significantly improve liquidity on the dYdX exchange through the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets.

We are one step closer to delivering on our vision to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by offering trustless and decentralized financial infrastructure for advanced crypto-financial products. Our decentralized exchange currently combines non-custodial, on-chain settlement with an off-chain, low-latency matching engine using order books. This has allowed us to deliver an institutional-grade, liquid, and low slippage trading experience for the DeFi world. Our products empower traders to better manage risk, more efficiently allocate capital, and express complex opinions on price and volatility.

In February 2021, dYdX and StarkWare launched a Layer 2 protocol for cross-margined perpetuals, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s perpetual smart contracts, allowing for significant improvements to non-custodial trading at scale. Traders can now trade with zero gas costs, and in turn, lower trading fees and reduced minimum trade sizes.

Over the past 5 months, dYdX’s Layer 2 perpetual protocol has:

  • Supported over $2.2 billion in volume from over 11,000 unique traders
  • Received $40 million in Total Value Locked from over 13,000 unique addresses
  • Launched 15 markets with more coming soon

We believe decentralized perpetuals are a big step forward for adoption and are a natural fit for DeFi. Smart contracts exist to solve problems around trustworthiness and lack of transparency. These issues exist with centralized perpetuals where users have no visibility into liquidation mechanisms, safety funds, and socialized losses. Furthermore, perpetuals open up a world of trading possibilities, not currently available in DeFi. Now any asset, not just those based on Ethereum, can be traded on DeFi. Perpetuals trading is an exciting use case on Ethereum and we’re thrilled to be building a core component of the DeFi ecosystem.

According to Fred Ehrsam, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Paradigm: "dYdX has built a simple, crypto native, and global exchange that users love. We've known Antonio since he left Coinbase years ago. He's built a great team around him to support the company's growth and future potential."

According to Evgeny Gaevoy, Founder and CEO at Wintermute: "dYdX is pioneering layer-2 DEX trading with their new platform based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine. It offers decentralization and non-custodial trading of perpetual futures without any of the drawbacks that similar solutions built on layer-1 Ethereum face. We expected nothing less from a brilliant team that brought us the first-of-its-kind fully decentralized spot margin trading just a few years ago!"

We’ll use the additional capital to:

  • Decentralize the protocol
  • Rapidly add new assets and features to the perpetuals contracts
  • Launch a mobile application
  • Partner with infrastructure players bridging the gap between centralized and decentralized finance
  • Strategically invest in international growth markets such as Asia
  • Continue to hire world-class engineers, designers, and business operators

Thanks to all for your support and feedback so far! If you’re excited about what we’re building at dYdX and want to join the team, please check out our Careers page. We’d love to hear from you!

About dYdX

dYdX is the developer of a leading decentralized exchange on a mission to build open, secure, and powerful financial products. dYdX runs on audited smart contracts on Ethereum, which eliminates the need to trust a central exchange while trading. We combine the security and transparency of a decentralized exchange, with the speed and usability of a centralized exchange.

About dYdX and Terms

Here at dYdX, our mission is to democratize access to financial opportunity. We believe that v4 software will represent notable progress in service of that mission. The events in the global economy that have transpired over the last year have only reinforced the need for open, transparent, and permissionless financial products. We’re excited for v4 software to better meet those needs.

If building the future of a decentralized exchange and open finance is something you’re interested in, check out what it’s like to work at dYdX and our open roles!

To ask additional questions, join the discussion on Discord, participate in the dYdX community, or follow us on Twitter. We’re excited to continue building the dYdX Chain and will continue to release updates over the coming months.

Terms and Conditions: This post is subject to the dYdX Terms of Use.  The dYdX interface and products are not available to persons or entities who reside in, are located in, are incorporated in, or have registered offices in the United States or Canada ("Blocked Persons"), or other Restricted Persons (as defined in the dYdX Terms of Use). dYdX products and services are not intended for, and should not be used by, Blocked Persons or Restricted Persons. Terms of Use specific to v4 software can be found here.

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dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to U.S. persons as well as in other restricted jurisdictions. The dYdX Foundation does not operate or participate in the operation of any component of the dYdX Chain's infrastructure.

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