Dydx is the brainchild of 28-year-old tech entrepreneur Antonio Juliano. Juliano is a computer science graduate hailing from Princeton University. The same academic institute has also bred out financial moguls like Sam Bankman-Fried, who is also known as a crypto billionaire in the tech circle. Before founding Dydx, Juliano worked for Coinbase for a year under the capacity of software developer and engineer.
He soon left the platform and joined Uber for a little while. Juliano’s first crypto-related project was a cryptocurrency-based search engine. This project did not perform very well; as per Juliano, it was created a little ahead of its time. After the first failure, he decided to study the financial world and blockchain technology in detail. Juliano noticed that a viable asset class first succeeds in a spot market before entering into the margin exchanges and branching out into derivatives. This idea served as the inspiration to create Dydx.
At present, the Dydx market has only 19 employees, and in September, its daily transaction volume rose higher than $1.7 billion. This number is even greater than the composite transaction volume of big names in the crypto exchange field like Coinbase. Juliano wanted to create a platform on top of the Ethereum blockchain that allows the users to take exposure in crypto-related derivatives.
Dydx intrinsically acts like a decentralized application that supports several related applications parallel to the platform. Due to the policies of United States regulators, Dydx has decided to stop providing support to the users in the region. For starting the project, Juliano managed to procure seed funding from financial institutions like Polychain Capital and Andresson Horrowitz. He even managed to invite the stakes of Coinbase co-founders Brain Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam for this project.
Dydx Founder Claims that He is in Contact with CFTC for Regulatory Clarity
Juliano recently told the media that he has been in contact with the financial watchdogs in the USA. He further added that CFTC officials got in contact with the organization about three years ago. He also explained that Dydx has been sending commentary letters to the regulator to stay away from legal disparity. The platform does not have a license or registration from any financial regulators in the United States.
Rather than using KYC and AML protocols, Dydx depends on a third-party service provider to monitor the user wallets for an illegal financial activity to cut costs and maximize profits. The platform made a huge leap forward with perpetual swaps that work as a futures contract without any expiration date. The platform has been trying to safeguard the users from wash trading and claims that the practice has reduced to 0.1% in September due to the technical adjustments.