perpetual-futures
(9)
Ellipsis Labs built an exchange. Then it went after the clock.
Phoenix put the order book on-chain. Now Ellipsis Labs is working on the machinery underneath finance - and the milliseconds that decide who gets a fair price.
VALR: The exchange that wants to be everyone’s plumbing
A Johannesburg crypto exchange won customers at the front door. Its more revealing ambition lies behind the walls: the trading, payments and account infrastructure other financial businesses can build upon.
Liquid Labs wants to put the whole trade onchain
The company behind GTE began by joining token launches, liquidity pools, and an order book. Its next act asks whether a decentralized exchange can make the machinery disappear.
Poloniex and the price of being early
A musician built an exchange for the coins other people overlooked. Poloniex’s history shows what happens when a marketplace grows faster than the machinery - and the rules - beneath it.
Backpack Lost Its Money. Then It Bought a Piece of FTX.
The crypto company lost 88% of its operating funds in FTX’s collapse. Three years later, it was processing former FTX Europe customers’ claims - while trying to make wallets, trading and stocks work in one account.
Utkarsh Sinha
Utkarsh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) fintech building a platform for traders outside the US to trade perpetual futures on American stocks with up to 20x leverage, self-custodial wallets, and local-currency onboarding. Raised in a middle-class family in Ranchi, he studied EECS at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at Columbia, worked at McKinsey and in engineering roles, and previously built Martian Wallet from his Columbia dorm room, scaling it to 2M+ installs and a $2B+ transaction volume before it was acquired.
Mochatrade
Mochatrade is a New York-based neo-brokerage that lets Indian traders trade perpetual futures on 50+ US stocks (NVDA, TSLA, AAPL), pre-IPO names, indices, commodities and crypto with up to 50x leverage. Users fund in Indian Rupees via UPI, trade on a familiar terminal-style app running on Hyperliquid's onchain infrastructure with non-custodial wallets, and withdraw back to their bank accounts - no US brokerage account or foreign remittance required. Founded in 2026 by three IIT graduates and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 batch) and Pioneer Fund.
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.
Tarek Mansour
Tarek Mansour is the co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, the first CFTC-regulated exchange for trading on the outcomes of real-world events. A Lebanese-American MIT graduate and former Goldman Sachs and Citadel trader, he turned a regulatory fight into a multibillion-dollar prediction market that lets anyone trade on elections, weather, economics and culture. In May 2026 Kalshi raised $1 billion in a Series F at a $22 billion valuation and became the first American firm to offer crypto perpetual futures under federal regulation.