We’re excited to announce that dYdX has raised a $10M Series B round led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital! We welcome new investors: Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group, and RockTree Capital.
Additionally we’re grateful for the continued support from a16z, Polychain Capital, Kindred Ventures, 1confirmation, Elad Gil, Fred Ehrsam, and other existing investors who participated in this or past rounds.
This is an important milestone for the dYdX team. Perpetuals trading is an exciting use case for blockchain technology and we’re thrilled to be building a core component of the decentralized financial ecosystem. dYdX’s decentralized exchange infrastructure combines non-custodial, on-chain settlement with an off-chain low-latency matching engine with order books to deliver an institutional-grade, liquid, and low slippage trading experience for the decentralized finance world. Our products empower traders to better manage risk, more efficiently allocate capital, and express more complex opinions on price and volatility.
2020 was a year of records. Total cumulative trade volume across Perpetuals, Margin, and Spot trading increased 40x, reaching $2.5 billion in 2020, up from $63 million in 2019. Volume on Spot and Margin markets was $1.9 billion in 2020, up from $63 million in 2019. Volume on Perpetual Contract markets was $563M since the protocol launched in April 2020. Volumes on the Perpetual Contracts grew as a percentage of total trading volume over the course of the year, accounting for 41% of total trading volume in December.
Volumes on Perpetual Contracts grew as a percentage of total trading volume, accounting for 41% of total trading volume in December. Over $17.4bn was originated in loans from the protocol's lending pools, with over 38,588 wallets depositing funds into the smart contract through December 31. The number of unique wallets using dYdX grew 4.8x last year.
We hired six new team members across Engineering, Design, and Growth. We also launched our decentralized Perpetuals protocol, with three markets achieving our goal of $10M in daily average trading volume. Since July, we've been building a new product for Perpetual Contracts on Layer 2, powered by Starkware's StarkEx system.
Since the start of 2021, total cumulative trade volume has surpassed $3.5 billion. In February 2021, we will launch our Layer 2 solution with StarkWare for cross-margined perpetuals to scale lower cost decentralized trading. We will be releasing more information on our alpha program soon.
According to Su Zhu, co-founder, CEO and CIO at Three Arrows Capital: "dYdX was the first DeFi app I ever used and I am elated to have the chance to invest in them today."
Arthur Cheong, Founder of DeFiance Capital said: "Antonio and the team have built a solid foundation for dYdX as one of the earliest and most successful DeFi protocols. We have been users since the early days and are excited to back dYdX in the current round to accelerate its mission to build the most powerful decentralized trading platform for cryptoassets.”
We’ll use the additional capital to:
Decentralize more parts of our stack and hand over more control to our users
Rapidly add new assets and features to our perpetuals contracts
Continue bridging the gap between traditional & decentralized finance
Strategically invest in international growth markets such as Asia, with a focus on Greater China
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!