June 15, 2021
April 22, 2025

dYdX Closes $65M Series C

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dYdX Closes $65M Series CdYdX Closes $65M Series C

We’re excited to announce that dYdX has raised a $65M Series C round led by Paradigm!

We also welcome many new top-tier strategic investors, including:

  • Liquidity Providers: QCP Capital, CMS Holdings, CMT Digital, Finlink Capital, Sixtant, Menai Financial Group, MGNR, Kronos Research
  • Crypto VCs: HashKey, Electric Capital, Delphi Digital
  • Partners: StarkWare

Additionally, we’re grateful for the continued support from past investors a16z, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Wintermute, and many others who also participated in this round.

This is an important milestone for the dYdX team. The additional capital allows us to maintain a long-term focus and significantly improve liquidity on the dYdX exchange through the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets.

We are one step closer to delivering on our vision to become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by offering trustless and decentralized financial infrastructure for advanced crypto-financial products. Our decentralized exchange currently combines non-custodial, on-chain settlement with an off-chain, low-latency matching engine using order books. This has allowed us to deliver an institutional-grade, liquid, and low slippage trading experience for the DeFi world. Our products empower traders to better manage risk, more efficiently allocate capital, and express complex opinions on price and volatility.

In February 2021, dYdX and StarkWare launched a Layer 2 protocol for cross-margined perpetuals, based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine and dYdX’s perpetual smart contracts, allowing for significant improvements to non-custodial trading at scale. Traders can now trade with zero gas costs, and in turn, lower trading fees and reduced minimum trade sizes.

Over the past 5 months, dYdX’s Layer 2 perpetual protocol has:

  • Supported over $2.2 billion in volume from over 11,000 unique traders
  • Received $40 million in Total Value Locked from over 13,000 unique addresses
  • Launched 15 markets with more coming soon

We believe decentralized perpetuals are a big step forward for adoption and are a natural fit for DeFi. Smart contracts exist to solve problems around trustworthiness and lack of transparency. These issues exist with centralized perpetuals where users have no visibility into liquidation mechanisms, safety funds, and socialized losses. Furthermore, perpetuals open up a world of trading possibilities, not currently available in DeFi. Now any asset, not just those based on Ethereum, can be traded on DeFi. Perpetuals trading is an exciting use case on Ethereum and we’re thrilled to be building a core component of the DeFi ecosystem.

According to Fred Ehrsam, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Paradigm: "dYdX has built a simple, crypto native, and global exchange that users love. We've known Antonio since he left Coinbase years ago. He's built a great team around him to support the company's growth and future potential."

According to Evgeny Gaevoy, Founder and CEO at Wintermute: "dYdX is pioneering layer-2 DEX trading with their new platform based on StarkWare’s StarkEx scalability engine. It offers decentralization and non-custodial trading of perpetual futures without any of the drawbacks that similar solutions built on layer-1 Ethereum face. We expected nothing less from a brilliant team that brought us the first-of-its-kind fully decentralized spot margin trading just a few years ago!"

We’ll use the additional capital to:

  • Decentralize the protocol
  • Rapidly add new assets and features to the perpetuals contracts
  • Launch a mobile application
  • Partner with infrastructure players bridging the gap between centralized and decentralized finance
  • Strategically invest in international growth markets such as Asia
  • 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 the developer of a leading decentralized exchange 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.

Legitimacy and Disclaimer

Crypto-assets can be highly volatile and trading crypto-assets involves risk of loss, particularly when using leverage. Investment into crypto-assets may not be regulated and may not be adequate for retail investors. Do your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets.

dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to U.S. persons as well as in other restricted jurisdictions. The dYdX Foundation does not operate or participate in the operation of any component of the dYdX Chain’s infrastructure.

The dYdX Foundation’s purpose is to support the current implementation and any future implementations of the dYdX protocol and to foster community-driven growth in the dYdX ecosystem.

The dYdX Chain software is open-source software to be used or implemented by any party in accordance with the applicable license. At no time should the dYdX Chain and/or its software or related components be deemed to be a product or service provided or made available in any way by the dYdX Foundation. Interactions with the dYdX Chain software or any implementation thereof are permissionless and disintermediated, subject to the terms of the applicable licenses and code. Users who interact with the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations thereof) will not be interacting with the dYdX Foundation in any way whatsoever. The dYdX Foundation does not make any representations, warranties or covenants in connection with the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations and/or components thereof), including (without limitation) with regard to their technical properties or performance, as well as their actual or potential usefulness or suitability for any particular purpose, and users agree to rely on the dYdX Chain software (or any implementations and/or components thereof) “AS IS, WHERE IS”.

Nothing in this post should be used or considered as legal, financial, tax, or any other advice, nor as an instruction or invitation to act by anyone.  Users should conduct their own research and due diligence before making any decisions. The dYdX Foundation may alter or update any information in this post in the future at its sole discretion and assumes no obligation to publicly disclose any such change. This post is solely based on the information available to the dYdX Foundation at the time it was published and should only be read and taken into consideration at the time it was published and on the basis of the circumstances that surrounded it. The dYdX Foundation makes no guarantees of future performance and is under no obligation to undertake any of the activities contemplated herein.

dYdX is a decentralised, disintermediated and permissionless protocol, and is not available in the U.S. or to U.S. persons as well as in other restricted jurisdictions. The dYdX Foundation does not operate or participate in the operation of any component of the dYdX Chain's infrastructure.

Nothing in this website should be used or considered as legal, financial, tax, or any other advice, nor as an instruction or invitation to act in any way by anyone. You should perform your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets due to high volatility and risks of loss.

Depositing into the MegaVault carries risks. Do your own research and make sure to understand the risks before depositing funds. MegaVault returns are not guaranteed and may fluctuate over time depending on multiple factors. MegaVault returns may be negative and you may lose your entire investment.

The dYdX Foundation does not operate or has control over the MegaVault and has not been involved in the development, deployment and operation of  any component of the dYdX Unlimited software (including the MegaVault).

Crypto-assets can be highly volatile and trading crypto-assets involves risk of loss, particularly when using leverage. Investment into crypto-assets may not be regulated and may not be adequate for retail investors. Do your own research and due diligence before engaging in any activity involving crypto-assets.