Antonio Juliano

Founder & CEO dYdX

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Antonio Juliano founded dYdX in 2017, aged roughly twenty-three, after two years as a software engineer and one failed startup. dYdX became one of the largest decentralised venues for perpetual futures — the leveraged derivative that dominates crypto trading volume — and Juliano’s defining decision as its chief executive was to give up a working, profitable position in order to own the infrastructure underneath it. In 2023 dYdX abandoned Ethereum, where it had been built, and rebuilt itself as a purpose-designed Cosmos SDK application chain with its own validator set and order book. Few teams with a functioning product attempt a migration of that scale. He stepped down as CEO in May 2024, taking chairman and president titles while Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen led the company, and returned five months later on the explicit argument that a company facing hard competitive conditions needs founder authority to make dramatic changes.

Career Highlights

• Founded dYdX Trading Inc. in 2017 and built it into one of the largest decentralised perpetuals protocols, at times accounting for a large share of all decentralised exchange volume.
• Raised roughly $87 million across four rounds: a $2 million seed in 2017 and a $10 million Series A in 2018, both co-led by a16z crypto and Polychain Capital, a $10 million Series B, and a $65 million Series C led by Paradigm in 2021.
• Led the migration off Ethereum to a standalone Cosmos SDK appchain, open-sourcing the v4 code in October 2023 and launching the dYdX Chain that month.
• Resigned as chief executive on 13 May 2024, becoming chairman and president of dYdX Trading while Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen took the CEO role, and returned as CEO in October 2024.
• Founded Weipoint, a search engine for the decentralised web, which he has publicly described as a failure that reached fewer than a dozen users.
• Worked as a software engineer at Coinbase, joining in 2015 straight out of Princeton, and at Uber and MongoDB.

Professional Journey

Juliano grew up in Pittsburgh and read computer science at Princeton. His first job after graduating, in 2015, was at Coinbase — early enough that working in crypto was still an unusual career choice. He left after about a year, having caught what he later called the entrepreneurial bug, and built Weipoint, a search engine for the decentralised web. He is unusually candid about the result: it attracted fewer than a dozen users before he shut it down. He also worked as an engineer at Uber and MongoDB during this period.

dYdX followed in 2017. The early product went through several iterations as both market demand and the technical limits of Ethereum changed, settling on perpetual futures for professional traders outside the United States. Funding came quickly from the crypto-native investors: a16z crypto and Polychain Capital co-led the seed and Series A, and Paradigm led a $65 million Series C in 2021, taking total funding to roughly $87 million.

The strategic turn came in 2023. dYdX had been running on Ethereum with StarkWare’s scaling technology, which worked but left the exchange dependent on infrastructure it did not control and could not tune for an order-book exchange’s specific needs. Juliano chose to rebuild on the Cosmos SDK as a dedicated application chain with its own validators, an approach that meant rewriting the system and migrating users and liquidity with no guarantee they would follow. The v4 code was open-sourced in October 2023 and the dYdX Chain launched the same month.

In May 2024 Juliano resigned as chief executive, citing personal and professional reasons, and became chairman and president of dYdX Trading Inc. Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, previously the chief strategy officer, took over as CEO. The arrangement lasted about five months. Juliano returned to the chief executive role in October 2024 and wrote publicly about the reasoning: that the company faced a genuinely difficult competitive environment, that the sabbatical had clarified he could not separate himself from what he had built, and that making dramatic changes requires founder authority. He framed the return as combining the drive of his first five years with what he had learned in the two most recent ones.

Since his return the protocol has moved toward direct value accrual for tokenholders. The dYdX community launched the first DYDX buyback programme, allocating a quarter of net protocol fees to monthly open-market purchases of the token, which are then staked to strengthen network security — a Treasury SubDAO action rather than a company one, reflecting the split between the protocol’s governance and dYdX Trading Inc.

Education

Princeton University

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science