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 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 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.
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn is the co-founder and CEO of Ostium, an onchain exchange for trading perpetual futures on real-world assets like oil, metals, equity indices and FX. A former professional ballet dancer who performed at the Royal Danish Ballet before studying neuroscience at Harvard, she met her cofounder running arbitrage strategies out of a Cambridge hacker house and built Ostium into the category leader for 'perpetual-ified' traditional assets. In December 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto at a roughly $250M valuation, and she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Finance the same year.
Dan Robinson is General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of crypto's most influential investment and research firms. A Harvard-trained lawyer turned protocol engineer, Robinson has co-authored landmark papers including the 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' MEV essay, the Uniswap v3 whitepaper, and the Blend NFT lending protocol. His work sits at the intersection of mechanism design, mathematical finance, and open-source software - making him one of the rare figures who shapes both how DeFi protocols are built and how capital flows into them.