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.
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.
0x is the open exchange infrastructure powering token swaps for many of crypto's largest apps - Coinbase, Robinhood, Phantom, MetaMask, Matcha and more. Through its Swap API, gasless transactions, and the underlying 0x Protocol, the company aggregates liquidity from hundreds of sources across the major chains so developers can ship trading experiences without building order routing themselves.
ControlUp is a digital employee experience (DEX) and autonomous endpoint management platform that helps IT teams see, score, and fix problems on every desktop, virtual session, and SaaS app before users start filing tickets. Born in Israel in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves more than 2,000 enterprise customers and was named a Leader in the inaugural 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DEX Tools.
Asaf Ganot is the co-founder of ControlUp, the company that pioneered the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management category. He spent a decade as CEO building ControlUp from an Israeli VDI monitoring tool into a global enterprise software leader backed by $141M in funding, before transitioning to Executive Chairman and CEO of ControlUp Labs in 2023 to focus on product vision and innovation.
Jed Ayres is the CEO of ControlUp, the $1B+ autonomous IT platform that executes over 14 million automated remediations per week across 6 million enterprise endpoints. A 20-year veteran of the end-user computing industry, Ayres has an unusual track record: he's joined companies in transformation, then handed them to acquirers. He turned IGEL from a hardware vendor into a software-first powerhouse that sold to TA Associates, scaled AppSense to an Thoma Bravo acquisition, and helped MCPc grow to $300M+ before it was acquired by Logicalis. At ControlUp since August 2023, he's steering the company's evolution from Digital Employee Experience (DEX) to what he calls a generational shift in IT - self-healing, AI-driven autonomous endpoint management. Off the clock, he completes Ironman triathlons and ultramarathons, which explains a lot about his leadership style.
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.