decentralized-exchange
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Amir Bandeali Built the Pipes for a World of Tokens
A former Chicago trader left the desk, learned to build, and bet that tokenized value would need open markets. Nearly a decade later, 0x is still solving the unglamorous machinery of how assets actually move.
Futureswap
Futureswap is a decentralized, non-custodial protocol for leveraged perpetual trading, letting users take long or short positions on crypto assets with leverage while liquidity providers earn fees and token incentives. Built by a small San Francisco team led by founder Derek Alia, it launched on Ethereum in 2020, later moved to Arbitrum and Avalanche for lower-cost transactions, and pioneered an AMM-based design that plugs into pools like Uniswap and Trader Joe. Backed by roughly $13.5M from investors including Ribbit Capital, Framework Ventures, True Ventures and Placeholder, it was governed by the community via its FST token.
dYdX
dYdX is a decentralized trading protocol best known for perpetual futures, where traders take leveraged long and short positions on crypto without handing custody to a centralized exchange. Founded by ex-Coinbase engineer Antonio Juliano in 2017, it evolved from an Ethereum DeFi app into its own sovereign Cosmos appchain (dYdX v4) that runs a high-performance, validator-operated order book settled in USDC. The protocol is governed by the DYDX token and, with the 2025 launch of spot trading, opened access to U.S. traders for the first time.
Antonio Juliano
Antonio Juliano is the founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges for crypto perpetuals and derivatives. A Princeton computer science graduate who learned crypto at Coinbase, he launched dYdX in 2017 and built it into a leading DeFi protocol. After stepping back from daily operations in 2024, he returned as CEO six months later, declaring he was going into 'Founder Mode' to revitalize the company.
Ostium
Ostium is an onchain perpetuals exchange built on Arbitrum that lets anyone long or short real-world assets - stocks, commodities, indices, forex and crypto - directly from a self-custodial wallet, with up to 200x leverage and no broker in the middle. Founded by Harvard classmates and former Bridgewater hands Kaledora Kiernan-Linn and Marco Antonio Ribeiro, Ostium uses synthetic perpetuals and a custom oracle system to bring traditional markets onchain. It has processed tens of billions in cumulative trading volume and raised $27.8M total, including a $20M Series A co-led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto in December 2025.
Will Warren
Will Warren co-founded 0x in October 2016 alongside Amir Bandeali, building the open protocol that became foundational DeFi infrastructure for peer-to-peer trading of Ethereum-based digital assets. A former applied physics researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who left a PhD program in structural engineering to bet everything on Ethereum, Warren grew 0x from a whitepaper into a protocol powering billions in DEX volume and a developer platform serving the broadest ecosystem of DeFi apps, wallets, and market makers. In May 2026 he stepped down as Co-CEO while remaining a major shareholder and board member.