I’m excited to announce that dYdX has raised an equity seed round led by Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz and Olaf Carlson-Wee at Polychain Capital. This is a big step on dYdX’s journey to create the first ever decentralized derivatives exchange. Other investors include Fred Ehrsam, Brian Armstrong, Elad Gil, Scott Belsky, Avichal Garg, Kindred Ventures, Abstract Ventures, 1confirmation, and many more great angel and seed investors.

We’re grateful to have the investor and advisor support of experienced entrepreneurs and operators who share our vision of building more open, transparent, and secure financial products through decentralization.

We will use the capital to:

Build a world-class team of engineers, designers, and business operators to execute our vision.

Undergo security audits on our open protocol to ensure dYdX is the most secure platform to trade derivatives

Design and develop a regulation-compliant approach towards building the first decentralized derivatives exchange

Here’s a little more about us:

Founded in July, dYdX is a decentralized exchange for derivatives on cryptoassets. dYdX is built on Ethereum and 0x, and uses smart contracts to power an open protocol for derivatives. In traditional markets, derivatives are typically 10x bigger than their spot markets. However, almost no derivatives currently exist for any cryptoassets besides Bitcoin. With daily cryptoasset trading volumes surpassing $35 billion, we expect crypto derivatives to be a multi-$100 billion market within the next few years.

With dYdX, anyone can take an option or short position without ever trusting their funds to a centralized exchange. In the past few months, we’ve built an open protocol and trading interface that are live in a private beta on the Kovan Testnet. We plan to launch on the main Ethereum network in mid-2018.

If you’re excited about what we’re building at dYdX and want to join the team, please reach out to me directly. I’d love to chat!

Finally, if you’d be interested in trading options, shorts, or other derivatives on our decentralized exchange, please join our slack to learn more.

Antonio Juliano

Founder, dYdX