"People Are Seeing The Writing on The Wall; DEXs Will Rule Crypto:" dYdX's Antonio Juliano

In this week’s episode we speak with Antonio Juliano, founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, focusing on derivatives. dYdX recently made news by being one of the first major DeFi projects to move to a Layer 2 scaling solution.

He talks about how dYdX will change for the user on Layer 2 —from transactions that cost cents instead of hundreds, being able to use one asset as collateral for many different tokens, to unlocking higher leverage. Juliano also explained why dYdX decided to go with StarkWare’s zk-rollup solution, instead of another Layer 2 solution or even on another blockchain, and it comes down to decentralization and security.

One of the main goals for his team this year will be to further decentralize dYdX, Juliano said, from the order book to the control of their smart contracts. So yes, for those reading between the lines, that means decentralized governance, and Juliano isn’t ruling out a dYdX token.

Juliano believes derivatives are going to be the biggest products in crypto and so his long-term goal is for dYdX to become one of the biggest crypto exchanges, period. He knows DEXes are just 5% of total crypto volume, but that’s up from 0% two years ago. He says, a lot of people are seeing the writing on the wall.