perpetuals
(4)
David Wells
David Wells is the CEO of Ondo Perps, the equity-perpetuals trading arm of Ondo Finance, where he leads the push to bring leveraged trading of U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities onchain with tokenized shares usable as collateral. He founded and ran Enclave Markets, the first Fully Encrypted Exchange, incubated within Ava Labs, after earlier roles at Two Sigma and Paxos. A Harvard Business School graduate and long-time markets operator, Wells has spent his career building institutional-grade trading infrastructure and arguing that crypto markets still hold real inefficiencies for those who can build fair, private, and efficient venues.
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.
Kaledora Kiernan-Linn
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
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.