dYdX founder unpacks Ethereum scaling and DeFi derivatives

Episode 9 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Antonio Juliano, founder of dYdX.

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Decentralized derivatives exchange dYdX is expanding.

After raising $10 million in Series B funding last month, the team is gearing up for its coming V3 launch. Detailing that push, founder Antonio Juliano sat down with The Scoop this week to talk about where the decentralized finance (DeFi) space is going in the coming year.

Platforms like dYdX could be the answer to the traditional financial system's transparency and security woes. But first, they have to grow.

Juliano told The Scoop how dYdX is handling scalability, including the mitigation of high gas fees. They're using ZK-Rollups, which involve the deployment of zero-knowledge proofs. These proofs take information and create a "constant sized data object" which means no matter how much data is input, the information remains the same size. The idea is that thousands of trades can be compressed into a small size to run on Ethereum, thereby circumventing the problem of high fees.

dYdX plans to launch their scaling solution in partnership with StarkWare in the next two weeks, according to Juliano.

Juliano broke down dYdX's path to ZK-Rollups in this week's episode of The Scoop, along with:

How dYdX's originated and why it was long before the boom of DeFi.
How its flagship product, the perpetual swap, works.
Why Ethereum layer-2 scaling solutions help projects like dYdX build out their market and which solutions dYdX considered for sure.
When the DeFi market might collide with the broader market.