On the evening of September 8, dYdX airdrops the highly anticipated project token DYDX and lists it on the exchange. Once token price has stabilized on secondary market, the airdrop is valued at over $10,000 per person, which makes this airdrop the most valuable yet in DeFi.
A “Silver Spoon” BeginningDYDX has a total supply of 1 billion. At its current price, the market values the dYdX project at over $15 billion fully diluted valuation and a market cap of over $750 million. Given dYdX is the leading platform in the DeFi derivatives space, the $15 billion valuation may be justified. But how did dYdX get here? Let’s take a quick look at its history.
As early as 2017, Antonio Juliano, the founder of dYdX, having graduated from Princeton University majoring in Computer Science, already had an impressive resume. Antonio worked as a software engineer at Coinbase, Uber, and database Mongo DB. In addition, other early team members of dYdX all came from famous companies such as Google, Coinbase, and Uber. Nevertheless, Antonio said in an interview that it was an “adventure” to be building out the dYdX project.
In addition to the founder’s insights to the potentials of distributed ledger systems, the architecture design of the dYdX system contributed to the success of dYdX. The project successfully closed a $2 million seed round in December of 2017, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain, and a $10 million Series A round in October of 2018, led by A16Z Crypto and Polychain. In the following rounds, dYdX attracted many more top tier VCs including Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital.
Run by a seasoned technology team and backed by well-known investment institutions, dYdX gone through a rapid development phase in 2020. Total aggregated trading volume from spot, margin, and futures trading grew a 40-fold, from $63 million in 2019 to $2.5 billion in 2020. It is worth noting that the trading volume of perpetuals continues to increase as a percentage of the total trading volume. In the last month of 2019, perpetuals account for 41% of total trading volume.
For further information, please check the original link: https://medium.com/@DerivStudio/will-dydx-lead-the-breakthrough-of-defi-derivatives-1a419ec28094