Today, I’m excited to share that dYdX Trading Inc. has acquired Pocket Protector!
Pocket Protector is a lean and highly talented team of builders who have created a premier social-first perps & Solana spot trading experience. As part of the acquisition, Eddie Zhang is joining as President, Kaiser Kinbote as Head of Growth, alongside their four person engineering team.
Pocket Protector’s products will join the dYdX product suite, and I’m excited for how their technology will power the expansion of the main dYdX product (stay tuned for more on this soon!).
This is a big moment for us, and a big step forward.
Why them
Since meeting Eddie last year, I’ve come to realize he is one of the best operators and most driven founders I have seen. He has strong product instincts, a track record of execution, and a rare ability to zoom between strategy and details. He built consumer social at scale (led early Messenger at Meta), launched companies from scratch (Fam), and knows what it means to build and ship fast. He will be an invaluable leader in this next growth-focused phase of dYdX.
Kaiser is equally impressive, a deeply crypto-native operator who understands growth, community, and where the space is going. Together, they bring the kind of experience and hunger we want on this team.
Their product, Pocket Protector, hit escape velocity in under a year. They built a Telegram-native trading app that grew virally to 50,000 users and over $1B in annualized trading volume. More than the numbers, what stood out to me was the quality and clarity of what they shipped. They knew their users. They iterated fast. They got things done.
That’s exactly the kind of mindset we want at dYdX.
Why now
When I started dYdX eight years ago, it was clear that perpetuals would become the next major product category in DeFi. The TAM was massive, the infrastructure was still being invented, and the opportunity felt wide open. As a young founder, that was incredibly energizing.
Since then, we’ve spent years focused on 0→1: inventing new systems, building novel architecture, and pushing decentralization to its limits. That work laid the foundation. Over the past year, we’ve finally seen that foundation meet the market. Volumes are growing. The product is resonating. And competition is heating up.
We’re no longer just proving the idea, we’re scaling it.
Now is the moment to go from 1→n: delivering exceptional user experience, expanding the product surface area, and building the best exchange in crypto. That takes speed, discipline, and a relentless focus on quality.
To do that, we need to position the team for success. This acquisition lets us do that with people we trust and believe in.
Eddie will help lead our core team’s day-to-day execution and drive our broader product and go-to-market strategy. Kaiser will focus on growth, bringing clarity to what matters, and pushing us to operate faster and smarter. Their team will embed directly into our engineering and product organisations, helping us deliver against an ambitious roadmap.
We’re here to build something enduring, and this team gets it.
What’s next
We’re already hard at work on integrating some of Pocket Protector’s best ideas and infrastructure into dYdX. That starts with bringing parts of their Telegram bot functionality into our platform, but it won’t stop there.
We’re also actively hiring for several key roles: Head of Research + Frontend & Infrastructure Engineers, among others. If you want to help build the future of decentralized trading and do it with one of the best teams in the space, we’d love to talk.
We’re entering the next chapter of dYdX - focused on growth, execution, and product expansion.
I’m thrilled to have Eddie, Kaiser, and the rest of the Pocket Protector team alongside us to build it.
— Antonio
Antonio Juliano is the Founder and CEO of dYdX Trading Inc., the open source software developer behind the dYdX protocol.
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