dYdX Closes $10M Series B Investment
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.
- Margin / Spot Trade Volume: $1.9 billion in 2020, up from $63 million in 2019.
- Perpetuals Volume Trade Volume: $563M since the new protocol was launched in April 2020.
- Volumes on our perpetual contracts grew as a percentage of total trading volume, accounting for 41% of total trading volume in December.
- 2020 Loan Originations: $17.4+ billion from dYdX lending pools.
- User Growth: unique wallets depositing funds into dYdX’s smart contracts increased by 4.8x from 8,000 wallets to 38,588 wallets through December 31.
- 6 new team members across Engineering, Design, & Growth.
In 2020, we launched our decentralized Perpetual protocol for 3 markets and achieved our goal of $10M in average daily volume. This was just the beginning. In the second half of 2020, we’ve been building a new product for Perpetual Contracts on Layer 2, powered by StarkWare’s Zero Knowledge Rollups.
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
- Partner with infrastructure players bridging the gap between centralized and 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!
About dYdX
dYdX is a leading decentralized exchange built by developers 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. Learn more at: https://trade.dydx.exchange/.