dYdX raises $10 million to develop its perpetual contracts ecosystem

The DEX for cryptocurrency derivatives dYdX raised $10 million following a Series B round led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital.

We’re excited to announce that dYdX has raised a $10M Series B round led by Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital! https://t.co/uZ2wFoyv3e@zhusu @Arthur_0x @DeFianceCapital

— dYdX (@dydxprotocol) January 26, 2021

The round also included participation from Wintermute, Hashed, GSR, SCP, Scalar Capital, Spartan Group, and RockTree Capital.

The company will deploy the funds toward the following objectives:

• increase the decentralisation of the protocol;
• expand the number of supported base assets in perpetual contracts and enhance their functionality;
• forge partnerships with infrastructure players to bridge the gap between centralised and decentralised finance;
• expand into new markets, particularly in China;
• expansion of the team with highly qualified professionals.

In February, dYdX plans to launch StarkDEX, a layer-2 solution from startup StarkWare. The aim is to reduce user costs and increase throughput. StarkDEX is based on a system of zero-knowledge proofs. The developers promise to present details soon.

Total trading volume on dYdX for the platform’s launched instruments in 2020 rose 40-fold—from $63 million to $2.5 billion. $563 million was attributed to perpetual-contract trading (in December their share of total volume reached 41%); $1.9 billion from spot/margin trading.

The volume of loans issued by the platform amounted to $17.4 billion.

According to DeFi Pulse, dYdX at the time of writing sits 18th in the ranking by the volume of frozen funds, at $142 million. Among decentralized lending platforms, dYdX ranks seventh by this metric.

In 2020, dYdX launched three perpetual contracts — on Chainlink (LINK), Ethereum and Bitcoin.

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