Antonio
Juliano

Antonio Juliano runs dYdX, a decentralized exchange where traders go long and short on crypto without ever handing their coins to a company. No custody desk. No "trust us." Just code on a blockchain that matches buyers and sellers. By the time most people learned the word "perpetuals," his protocol was already moving billions of dollars in them.

That is the part worth sitting with. Juliano did not write a manifesto and wait for the world to catch up. He shipped. dYdX grew into one of the largest venues in decentralized finance for margin trading, lending, and derivatives - the kind of plumbing that usually lives inside a regulated brokerage, rebuilt as open software anyone can audit.

And then, in May 2024, after seven years, he stepped down as CEO. He moved to chairman and president, and said something founders rarely admit out loud: he had no plan for what came next.

Six months later he was back. Not as a figurehead. As CEO, hands on the wheel, in what he publicly branded "Founder Mode." The market had turned brutal, competition had sharpened, and Juliano decided the only person who could carry the weight was the person who had created it.

Why a founder comes back

His return note read less like a press release and more like a confession. He described his own evolution in three acts: the first five years driven by achievement, the next stretch driven by connection to the people he worked with, and now a motivation that simply exists without needing a trophy at the end.

It is a strange and honest thing to publish. Most leaders explain their decisions with strategy decks. Juliano explained his with a meditation on what it means to make something. "A founder sees their company as every age it has ever been, simultaneously," he wrote. That is not the language of a quarterly update. It is the language of someone who cannot tell where he ends and the company begins.

From a Coinbase hallway to his own chain

The origin is almost too neat. Juliano graduated from Princeton in 2015 with a computer science degree and joined Coinbase as an engineer. There, in the hallways and talks, he heard people like Vitalik Buterin and Olaf Carlson-Wee describe what Ethereum and smart contracts might become. He lasted about a year before the itch to build his own thing won.

First came Weipoint, a search engine for the decentralized web - an idea aimed at a future that had not quite arrived. Then, in 2017, dYdX. While building, he also did a stint as a software engineer at Uber, and earlier had time at MongoDB. The pattern is consistent: go where the hard technical problems are, then leave to solve a harder one yourself.

Years later, dYdX outgrew the very network that inspired it. Ethereum could not deliver the speed and throughput a serious exchange needs, so Juliano's team did the unfashionable thing and built dYdX its own blockchain rather than renting space on someone else's. "We can't build something like this on Ethereum," he told CoinDesk as the new chain neared launch.

The unpopular opinions

Juliano is not shy about saying things the room does not want to hear. After the FTX collapse, while others scrambled, he framed the wreckage plainly: the disappearance of a giant's market share and its reputation for innovation was, for builders, an opening. And in 2024 he argued that crypto builders should simply give up on serving US customers for the next five to ten years and re-enter once the rules made sense - a position as practical as it was provocative.

When he came back as CEO, he matched words with hard choices, restructuring the company and cutting roughly a third of staff while promising a pivot toward instant market listings and a relaunched, "unlimited" product. Founder Mode, it turns out, is not a vibe. It is a willingness to make the unpleasant call yourself.

What he is actually after

Strip away the crypto jargon and the ambition is old-fashioned: build financial infrastructure that does not require you to trust a middleman. An exchange that cannot run off with your money because no one holds it. A market that lists what people want to trade, instantly, without a gatekeeper deciding. dYdX is his long bet that this is not a phase but the eventual shape of things.

What makes him unusual is the combination. Plenty of engineers can architect an exchange. Plenty of founders can give a stirring speech. Juliano ships the system and then writes publicly about the emotional cost of building it - the letting go, the return, the way creation refuses to release its maker. "Now, I feel free," he wrote of coming back. "I will never get away, the company is a part of me."

He returned, he said, with the drive of his first five years and the wisdom of his last two. For the first time, he admitted, he does not know where the story goes next. He just knows he is in the right place to find out.