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Scaling Interchain DeFi - IBC Eureka x dYdX
Recorded: April 22, 2025 Duration: 0:45:12Space Recording
Short Summary
DYDX is making waves in the DeFi space with its transition to a sovereign app chain on Cosmos, showcasing significant growth and innovative tokenomics. The platform is set to launch new features, including EVM integration and advanced trading options, while emphasizing decentralization and performance.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. so
um Thank you. Thank you. All right.
We cut the music.
Thank you, DJ. Appreciate it.
That always gives me flashbacks to being on hold with
some insurance company or something. Anyway, very exciting space we have today. We have
Antonio, the founder and CEO of DYDX with us. Antonio, thank you so much for joining
us. Really excited to have you on.
Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to chat.
Yeah.
You want to give a quick intro about you, DYDX?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm Antonio, the founder of DYDX.
Been in the crypto space for a long time now, since 2015, and founded DYDX all the way back in 2017.
Had a long road at DYDX,
building on a lot of different technologies.
And fast forward to today,
we're one of the largest app chains in the Cosmos ecosystem.
DYDX is one of the leaders in DeFi plus derivatives.
And I'm excited to chat, Meg.
Me too, me too.
Yeah, watched you guys go through the whole thing from
being on, was it Stark
Net or Stark Ware or was getting confused?
Yeah.
So Stark Ware before Stark Net
was even a thing. DYDX was
pretty early to the L2 game, like
three or four years ago.
And then kind of have
moved off of that since then to
our own app chain.
So hopefully we feel like we're a little bit ahead of the game in terms of this tech curve that I feel like major apps often go through.
And it's really landed us squarely within Cosmos.
Yeah, you've been a big app chain maxi for as long as I remember.
And there's definitely reasons for that, which I'm sure we'll get into.
But cool, I mean, it's really nice to have you.
We've all been in Cosmos using and watching
and trying to support the development of DYDX.
Would love to sort of hear what the journey has been like
coming into Cosmos and maybe getting a little
into why you guys decided to rebuild as an app chain.
I'm sure you've told the story a thousand times, but.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, normally I'm talking to people that are outside the Cosmos ecosystem.
So I'll focus on that and the most recent part of our journey with the app chain.
So, yeah, like we mentioned, we really started building in Cosmos about two or
three years ago now. The decision was that we wanted to build something that was fully
decentralized, but still really performant. And I think actually, if you look at Perp Dex in
particular, it's an interesting niche because these are really the apps that are pushing the
blockchain to its absolute performance limits.
So for those who aren't familiar, DYDX runs an exchange,
and we're different than most DEXs because we run on an order book-based architecture.
And this is really important if you're trying to do a more pro style of trading
and one that's focused on derivatives trading.
But suffice it to say for this conversation,
that requires a huge amount of performance,
like thousands of orders placed per second
with ideally low or no gas fees.
And so as you mentioned, Meg,
we a couple of years ago were on an L2
and we really felt like we had pushed
what was possible with the performance limits of kind of the Ethereum and the L2, and we really felt like we had pushed what was possible with the performance limits
of kind of the Ethereum and the L2 ecosystem at that point in time.
And we wanted to build something that was fully decentralized, but still really performant.
And so we'll dive into this a lot more, I'm sure.
But the high level reason we went into Cosmos is because it allows us to do that.
we went into Cosmos is because it allows us to do that. And it because specifically it allows us to
build something that's really custom for our use case. And so today what we have is we built this
kind of novel blockchain architecture where we have an off-chain but still decentralized order
book. We effectively use the mempool to run an order book before things even
get into the on-chain consensus. And this is really something that's only possible
with the Cosmos SDK, the Tendermint consensus. So that's what brought us to this ecosystem,
was the technology itself. And there's a lot more that goes into it from there. But we really try to focus on building the best possible product.
And I think that's really why you see PerpDexes, which are really specific and kind of late stage, at least from a technology perspective, kind of app within DeFi, really focused on pushing the limits of the blockchain technology.
And for us and some others in that space really winding up on building
our own chain. Yeah, I'm curious. You said one of the things that really attracted you to Cosmos
was the ability to basically have very strong performance properties. But as far as I think a
lot of us are led to believe centralized sequencers on rollups are the potential answer to that, right? Like you can run them like you would, you know,
you're basically running, uh, you know, uh, AWS instance or running it on your
own laptop. Like, I'm curious what, what sort of, how, how did you square that,
that difference?
Yeah. And that is something that can give you a lot of potential performance, but it
really depends on where you want to be on this kind of decentralization versus performance
curve.
And decentralization has also been something that's been very important to DYDX for a long
time.
And for us, and this is, you know, I know this architecture well, because this is literally
what we were doing when we were building on an L2 for the previous version of DYDX.
But then we had this mission and this goal to fully decentralize and really just make DYDX open source software that's run by many people and that's more owned by its users.
that's more owned by its users.
And that kind of point on the decentralization curve
where it is really decentralized,
but still very performant
was something that we could only do
by building our own chain.
Yeah, you took the,
I would say you took the hard path.
Yeah, I'd say so too.
And it certainly has been a challenge.
It took us about a year and a half
or maybe two years or so
to build this production ready version of what's now the DYDX chain.
But it's something that feels like it's finally starting to work really well.
And it was definitely the right decision in retrospect.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, I've been always impressed with just the speed at which you guys have pushed or the performance that
you beat out of the Cosmos SDK.
And I know you guys have done a lot of custom stuff yourself to get that to happen and upstream
did and other people for other people to benefit and take a look at.
I know you took, I mean, I think one of the most public things that you've done recently
is just on a personal level,
you took a leave of absence and came back. And I'm curious, I'm sure you've told the story of why,
but I'd love to get into the sort of like the current state of what you're excited about at DYDX and what sort of keeps you going right now. Yeah. So about a year ago now you're right i did step down as ceo at that point in time
um and really then i was it was coming from a place where i had been doing dydx
everyday perspective for about seven years at this point now almost almost eight years into
the journey and i think you really just hit this point with any kind of relationship.
And being a founder really is a deep relationship with your company, where after seven years, you just really evaluate, hey, what are you doing?
And is this something that you want to it has a huge amount of room to grow into something even bigger, which I still absolutely believe that DYDX does, then you have to about six months ago. And after that six months leave
of absence, I came back. And that was for two reasons. I think first of all, it was just finding
deeper within myself, this commitment to what we're doing at DYDX, this commitment to the company,
to our users. And genuinely, I feel a lot of commitment to DeFi and Web3 overall.
Like DYDX has been one of the real OGs in the DeFi space.
I think it's something that does have a lot of longevity.
And it's something that I still do believe has a lot, a huge amount of opportunity to grow from here,
both with the technology, with the business, with the users and overall just what we're building.
So that's a big part of what
drew me back. And then the second part of what drew me back is a real necessity, in my opinion.
And I think that we're seeing this a lot in the crypto space overall now. And this was something
I was feeling even six months ago. And that's a big part of the reason why I came back then.
But it's just a really big changing of the perspective, in my opinion, of what we're
doing here for everybody in crypto, away from mostly just building for the future, for some
kind of the sake of technology, into really building sustainable businesses right now.
And DYDX, I think it's probably no surprise to anybody that's been on
crypto Twitter in the past six months is facing a huge competitive environment right now. And so
are a lot of things in crypto. And that's a big reason why I came back. I felt like needed to
kind of reforge and remake the internals of the company with what we're doing. And they just really get back to excellence building to the future.
And, you know, DYDX is something that will always have longevity.
It's hopefully now it can continue to be really competitive on a day in day out basis as well.
And I'm excited to continue leading that.
Yeah, the sort of coming back to address and rebuild the company in the face of like, you know, the space has moved a lot, I think, since DYDX first came out.
I think it was basically, you know, one of the first real perps exchanges, if I'm not mistaken.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, we even started before perps were even a thing.
It's funny, you know, like even DYDX didn't have perps until like four years ago. And in fact, it's funny, like how many perp decks there are now, because five or six
years ago, we were kind of sitting here in the space where like, Oh, my God, dude, is it impossible
to build perps in DeFi? And it's just interesting the way you look at something before it's actually
been done. And it seems so hard, almost insurmountable. But then once someone has done it,
and that's one of the things that I'm proud of is bringing perps and a number of different types of
advanced financial products. Like we were even pretty much the first to bring margin trading
to DeFi. We invented DEX aggregators. We invented flash loans, like all these sorts of things at
DYDX. And before you do it, it kind of feels impossible. But after you do it, it really
brings a lot of innovation to the space, both for yourself and for other people. And ultimately,
what's important is driving that value to the end users. Right, right. And I know you've had
a lot of different updates on that sort of the method by which you provide value to users and to,
or the way that the protocol provides value to users.
Do you want to just chat through some of them?
I thought they were pretty exciting.
Yeah, absolutely.
And what are you referring to just in terms of like the product itself,
like anything around the product, like the value capture or something else?
Yeah, I was thinking about the value capture and I saw a lot of talk about sort of like
a new tokenomics in terms of buyback programs and things like that.
Yeah, and this is something that's really community driven, but this is something that's
uniquely possible with the DYDX chain and the technology that I've been talking about
overall as well.
And one of the cool things with the DYDX chain is that it is 100% open source.
And really our jobs internally at the core dev team is to write this open source software
kind of like a normal blockchain.
And then for any value that's derived from that software to be captured by the actual users and by the people running that infrastructure.
And that's how it works on the DYDX chain right now.
Like there exists the DYDX token, it's just staking.
And ever since the launch of the DYDX chain, 100% of the value that is generated on the DYDX chain goes to the DYDX token holders,
at least on that instance of
the protocol. And that's something that I think the DYDX ecosystem has been pioneering on since,
again, before it was cool. I think one of the things, Meg, that you're referring to more
recently is the DYDX ecosystem enacted its first series of buybacks. So now there's a couple different ways that the
value from the DYDX ecosystem goes to the token holders. First of all, through buybacks now,
then through staking to the token holders. And that's continued to be a thing for the past year
and a half or so since the launch of the DYDX chain. Yeah, really cool. I saw that and I was like, wow,
this is like sort of what permissionless technology
should enable is the actual participants of the network
being able to control and being able to dictate
sort of how they're rewarded for using the protocol, right?
And then sort of like shared ownership.
I thought that was really awesome.
So getting back just to the Cosmos thing for one second, I know building your own chain
is not easy. And leading into Eureka a little bit and the conversation on the partnership
around that, I'd love to hear what have been the main, if you could give your top three
challenges for building in a sovereign way, what have they been and how have you addressed them?
And what more do you think we could do? Yeah, so I think the biggest challenge is just that it's
more complicated than building a smart contract on, you know, an existing blockchain. So when
you're building your own app chain, you're thinking about a lot more, right? And the Cosmos ecosystem
and the Cosmos SDK specifically are really nice for this, right? Because you don't have to design
consensus from scratch. You don't have to design a lot of these different things.
And so a lot of that stuff did work pretty well for us out of the box. I'd say the biggest
challenge for us, and this is self-imposed, has been that we're trying to do something that's
pretty custom with the Cosmos SDK open source
software. And that's this kind of off-chain but decentralized order book that I was talking about
before. So that's probably been the biggest challenge and the biggest reason why it took us
a little bit longer to develop this blockchain. And then I would say fast forward to today,
that's still the right decision. It's working pretty well.
I'd say some of our biggest challenges now
are more kind of the product ecosystem level,
like bridging to some extent is still pretty challenging.
And there has been big improvements here.
You know, obviously we've been working with you guys a lot
on more of the core Cosmos teams with your, your bridging software. Um, I'd say overall, just the fact that first of
all, like you do have to do bridging to, to get into a Cosmos app chain, that can be a pretty
big hurdle for users overall. Um, and then I'd say things like getting the bridging times down,
the cost of bridging down is important too. Like
we see that being a fairly big drop off in our onboarding funnels. Yeah, excited that we're
going to be talking about Eureka. And that's obviously a huge step forwards in terms of
allowing a lot of different assets to exist on the chain. So I'm sure we'll dive into that later,
but excited for that. But historically, that kind of has been a challenge like finding high quality assets that can exist within the cosmos
ecosystem um and then yeah i'd say after that it's it's really just um on kind of the performance
side on on building something that works really well um so kind of core performance stuff within
the blockchain itself does matter as well.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, the comment you made about bridging definitely rings true.
But then I think about it, I'm like, if you were on NASDAQ, right, you would have to know,
like, how does that work? Do you ACH your money in? Do you have to sort of deposit before you
use these really fast sort of like, you know,
CeFi or I guess like traditional finance applications?
Yeah.
so you're right.
And it depends like what you're comparing to.
And I think what we're trying to get to right now is at least parity with
centralized crypto exchanges from like a burgeoning perspective.
And I think we're pretty close to that.
I'd say like, but it still is different.
And I think this is somewhere
where perps exchanges can improve too.
Like if you're using a spot decentralized exchange,
you don't really even have to bridge.
There's no concept of like depositing
to a spot decentralized exchange.
And that's really powerful.
You can just trade directly from your wallet.
So I think that's more of the direction
we're trying to go in at DYDX for the long term. And it works pretty well right now. Like if you
go to DYDX, you can just connect pretty much any wallet. It doesn't have to be a Cosmos specific
wallet. You can deposit. But I think fast forward a few years from now, maybe even like within the
next 12 to 18 months or so, I think it'd be really cool if we can build more of kind of
an intense based architecture around this stuff
where you can just have your funds sitting in your normal
wallet on whatever source chain.
And then you can come, you can just click trade.
You don't even have to onboard, don't even have to deposit.
And so I think that's probably the way things are moving.
What do we need to get to that?
Yeah, and I think we's probably the way things are moving. What do we need to get to that? Yeah, and I think we have all the more of the building blocks now.
But I'd say a lot of this technology comes in pieces.
It's like, first of all, you build the infrastructure to do this kind of intense, you know, based routing.
So it's like if you have your money on Ethereum or something like that, then you'd want to sign some sort of intent that can be recognized by the DYDX chain itself.
That's, hey, not only do I want to deposit, but after I deposit, I want to open an Ethereum long or whatever.
And so, you know, I think we have the building blocks for that.
I think it's probably more of a partnership between the DYDX chain itself and some sort of infrastructure provider to be able to make that happen.
And it's just a matter of building a really custom UI, custom use case,
having forwarders that know how to do that stuff to allow to that.
Yeah, it's stuff like this that really gets me excited about IBC,
because this is really where I'd love to take IBC in the direction of it,
is basically providing really good cross-chain programmability where you can encode like multi-actions that are
sequenced so you can say hey after you land on this chain do this action and we do that today
with with skip go right because you can do um you know multi-hop transfers and swaps in a single transaction from anywhere basically.
But I don't think it,
it took a long time to get that to work
and I don't think that's well socialized
in terms of how to program IBC to do that
and requires a lot of middleware
and a lot of sort of like third party dependencies
that as we all know, like need to get audited and need to get
checked and need to stay performant and maintained. But that is something that I'm personally really
excited about. It's just sort of how can we make it, how can we create that experience in a
decentralized way with IBC? You know, I don't think we're very far away from that future.
Yeah, I totally agree. And that's part of what I'm excited about with Eureka too. And Eureka specifically expanding IBC some more blockchains as this becomes possible
to and from more places. And you're absolutely right. Like, I think it starts at the IBC level,
but then I think the thing that people don't quite appreciate is how much work goes more into that
middle layer of just having, you know, all of that routing happen, having forwarders that know how to forward these things, having
the destination chains, i.e. like the DYDX chain in this example, really builds and support that
use case, programming it into the UI, into something that just looks seamless. So again,
I don't think that we're too far away from that. And I think Eureka is a really
big step forwards towards getting us there. Yeah, I think actually we're closer, like I look at
SkipGo and what we've done with IVC just as an ecosystem. And it's so far ahead of anything that
I've seen on in the L2 landscape, in the Alt-L1 landscape outside of Cosmos.
I think it really is actually already very far ahead.
And I think a lot of these things are pipe dreams
in the Ethereum ecosystem,
but very much so are either realities today
or will be very soon in the Cosmos ecosystem,
which to me, I think is really cool.
But yeah, just more specifically on Eureka,
how has that helped you guys actionably? And where do you plan to go with that?
Yeah, so I'd say for us, it's more things I'm excited about in the not too distant future, but it does unlock quite a lot for us. You know, we just talked about what I would say
is kind of a more advanced use case of, hey, could we have more of an intense based architecture
where you can use DYDX from other source chains without depositing or even moving your funds over,
at least as a first step. But I think the bigger thing and more actionable thing immediately
is just having all kinds of different tokens from different ecosystems. So from Ethereum, from EVM chains on the Cosmos ecosystem. And once it gets into
Cosmos, then you can just pretty easily IBC those tokens over anywhere you want, including the DYDX
chain. So that's great for us for a couple of reasons. And one of the things we plan to do,
and hopefully the not too distant future is add spot trading for all these different
types of assets um and that's something i am excited about and i think the thing to be excited
about there and what dydx can uniquely offer with d5 spot is more of a pro style spot trading
experience so like you know you can already trade all these evm tokens on whatever source chain you
may be on. So like
on Ethereum or on base or whatever. But they're all in just an AMM, right? And there is certainly
a market for these things being traded in a more professional way with order books, with actual
market makers, with all kinds of different order types on a venue that has perps and spot. So
that's something I'm excited about and hopefully the not too distant future and something
that Eureka really enables. And that's been the big blocker for us for adding spot for a long time
is we once we move right, exactly. And it's kind of like once we move to cosmos, we're like,
okay, like, it's actually not that hard for us to add spot. It's not trivial. But it's like,
we already have this trading infrastructure, we already have this exchange that works with order
books.
And it's not that, it's actually easier to make it work
with spot than it is to make it work with perps.
But we didn't have the assets exactly.
And so, you know, there kind of were bridges
that existed before, but we didn't like feel great
about any of them.
One of the reasons we've kind of sidesteped
this whole bridging stuff so far is that we use Cosmos native USDC, which because of Circle, the way Circle does bridging, you can just have native USDC on Cosmos with zero bridge risk.
And that's the collateral that exists on DYDX.
So previously, we kind of sidestepped this entire bridging know, none of those bridges did exist on Ethereum,
but now with Eureka, we have those assets directly on the chain.
Yeah, totally.
That's really interesting.
So this would be like when you say using your existing infrastructure, it's like this could be a,
this would be a order based or order book based spot exchange.
Yeah, that's the plan right now.
And I think that's the thing that would be actually easiest for us to add and also most
differentiated.
So we'd very likely do it that way.
That's really cool.
I'm excited to see that.
Yeah, in that situation, you definitely want to, it probably makes sense to explore some
of the deeper programmability around Eureka so that you can do things like transfer to DYDX from your
Metamask wallet on Ethereum, swap on the order book, and then bring it back to Ethereum all in
one transaction. And getting that to be fast is going to be a challenge, but it's totally possible.
We just need to build out that market maker network. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah,
I'd somewhat considered that, but that would be especially cool
if we can kind of just use DYDX and the chain
as just another liquidity provider
for all types of things that exist on these source chains too.
Especially if we can get the bridging to be fast enough,
to be cheap enough, all these kinds of things,
but that's certainly possible.
Yeah, I think for things like that,
if you're to believe that you're going to build a really competitive execution for swaps, then having those kinds
of integrations like into Ethereum can get you sort of included in the aggregators that are so
right. Exactly. And then, you know, if you have better execution, you just beat them out and can
drive a ton of volume. I think the tricky part though is, as you said, if you have better execution, you just beat them out and can drive a ton of volume.
I think the tricky part, though, is, as you said, which is the market makers and making sure that it's all really fast and cheap.
But that's really awesome.
So I'm curious, another thing that could probably be enabled by Eureka, and I imagine you've thought about it is this and you mentioned USDC is the
idea of multi collateral or being able to deposit other forms of collateral besides USDC. What are
your thoughts on that in general and sort of why hasn't that or has it been you know a big roadmap
item that you just haven't gotten to? It has certainly been a big roadmap item I'd say
something that's a little bit longer term.
So before you build that, you need the two things we just talked about, right?
Which are obviously the tokens on the chain.
And now with Eureka, we'll have that.
That's awesome.
Then you need the spot trading to be on the same platform.
And so we'll have to add spots.
But again, there's a lot of product reasons to be excited about having that.
And then once we have those two things, it's not trivial, but it's certainly
possible to add multi-collateral.
And so I would say it is on the DYDX roadmap, probably in the like 12 to 18
months time horizon.
Um, but it is something that we've seen be a really big differentiator for
purpose platforms.
Um, obviously FTX, a lot of users like that because
of their margining system you can put anything as collateral right right you can pretty much put out
anything as collateral and so i'd say that that certainly is what the market wants and then it
just has to be done well so there's got to be assets in a way where you're not introducing
additional risk to the platform there's got to be enough liquidity with all of the spot markets for those assets.
But I think that's really something that is going to be the case soon on DYDX.
And then after that, multi collateral will really be unlocked.
Yeah, absolutely.
Very excited for that too.
As a big user of alt stable coins, I think that would be really awesome to see.
Circling back on one other thing you said,
you've worked really hard to make D-Y-D-X a success, right?
And to replicate the C-Fi type experience,
or at least to get to par with it and ideally surpass it.
We all work really hard to try to make all this technology
decentralized and permissionless.
And it makes things, as I was saying before,
like I think it makes things really difficult.
It's like playing on hard mode.
And the same thing with IBC Eureka, right?
So if you already have bridges
and we already have ways of transferring assets,
but the reason we built Eureko is because
those aren't sustainable from our point of view.
You know, they're either multi-sigs or they're, you know, centralized in some sort of way,
or you know, they're not credibly open and permissionless, et cetera.
You know, you've spoken a lot and been a huge defender of decentralization.
So, sort of what is your thesis around that and why
continue the fight to make really deeply decentralized technology?
Yeah, it just gets back to the root of why Web3, why DeFi? And it's expressed in almost every
single platform that's being built in Web3 right now. Bridges are a huge part of it. The chains
themselves are a huge part of it. The products are a huge part of it. The chains themselves are a huge part of it.
The products are a huge part of it.
And it gets back to what I was saying before and it gets back to the why.
Like, why are we doing this?
Are we just building something
that has already been built before?
Or are we building something that has never existed?
And that is a fundamentally better way of doing things.
And that's why I got into this space all the way back 10 years ago.
And it's why I continue to be excited about it.
This is why I came back, frankly,
is because we're doing something important
and because we're doing something that's different.
If we're just going to do the same things that have already been done,
but packaged up in a way that makes things look decentralized decentralized make things look safer all this kind of stuff it's not very interesting to me um
and i think some of those things may be important steps along the path to be able to get there you
know like dydx has had a centralized sequencer in the past um and so i don't necessarily bemoan
people doing things like that but we have to always be remembering what the ultimate goal is here.
And it's to build something that is decentralized.
That is just open source software that does have the highest security
properties that is able to be owned by its users.
And that, as you say, at the end of the day,
literally just works better than what has come before it.
works better than what has come before it. And that's hard. It's really fucking hard.
And that's hard. It's really fucking hard.
And honestly, like bridges are one of the things that has surprised me. And I think a lot of other
early people in the space, like seven years ago, I was kind of sitting here being like, oh yeah,
I don't know, like bridges that will probably be solved in like two or three or four years from now,
like seven years ago. and fast forward seven or eight
years later um i think we're finally just starting to see with the expansion of ibc
bridges that actually work right like all the other bridges like suck like how many bridge acts
do we have to have before people understands that like it's not safe to leave your funds
in an extended way in in a bridge that's basically just reduces to a multi-sig,
even if that's some kind of like network of multi-sig holders or something. And with IBC,
it's actually something that we feel comfortable with, right? And that's why we're finally
comfortable doing things like adding spot, having these assets on the chain. So it's something
that's really aligned with the ethos of DYDX, of decentralization, and
that we feel does meet the highest standards we always hold for our products of performance
and safety as well.
Yeah.
It's this concept that I think about a lot, which is like, you cannot compromise.
There's no compromises.
And what I mean by that is, you know, I see new faster versions of things come out that
have taken a lot of shortcuts and then the users pay for it at the end of the day. And I, you know,
it's fun at the time because, you know, it's very easy to build centralized technology. I mean,
we've been doing it for, you know, over 50 years at this point, but then it can come crashing down
and it can have properties
that you thought you were avoiding and it's very easy to mask those.
So I just want to say, I really admire all the things that you guys are doing to not
compromise in that way.
It makes me a lot more excited to use DYDX and proud to have you guys in the ecosystem. One thing that I really want to do,
so obviously as folks probably here know,
Skip was acquired by the ICF
and we've been taking over the majority
of the development of Cosmos
and even the growth aspect
and the marketing aspect, et cetera.
And one of the things that really excited me about
Cosmos and the new chance and the new fresh blood
that we have now is we can build an ecosystem
of really functional, good applications
that leverage each other deeply,
that sort of operate together a little more harmoniously
than what we've seen in other ecosystems.
And that sort of like feed each other and have shared user sets and eventually replace
huge parts of what we've come to use and generally use for our financial system.
So firstly, I'm very excited that you guys are going to build out more features in that
area.
I'm always on the hunt for an app that is good enough that I can use to replace my bank
or replace at least some part of my centralized dependency set.
So I think that's awesome.
Cool.
So my last question, I think we're good on time, is what's next?
What are the big things right now?
Obviously, you have Spot.
You're thinking about Spot.
What are the big things that are coming out for DYDX or things that you're personally excited about that the community should watch out for or prepare to start using?
you know prepare to start using so really the big focus for the past few months and the next few
months has been on the performance side we just want to make sure dydx is the best product to
trade perps and like we talked about and alluded to there has been a lot of competition on that
recently and as as you appreciated mag like one of of the constraints here is that DYDX always
does hold itself to the highest standards of safety, of decentralization. And so finding ways
that we can be competitive and we can have the best possible product is a journey and is something
that was a big step forward with the launch of the DYDX chain a year ago, but is something that continues to be a huge focus.
It's just like, and especially for a pro product like a derivatives platform,
all this stuff really matters.
It's like every millisecond of order latency really matters.
Every amount of correctness matters.
So we've been doing a big sprint on just performance for the past few
months. And we have already made a lot of progress there. But that's something that continues to be
a huge priority for us. Some other things that we're working on in the nearer term are more on
the product and the UI level, really just trying to reimagine what a Perps platform can look like if you go on DYDX or pretty much any Perps platform right now.
It's pretty complicated.
And for a lot of users, that's absolutely what they need.
They demand all kinds of order types, all kinds of charts.
It's just like the most complicated exchange you could use.
you could use. And what I've been really interested in recently is can we take the product that is
perps and package it up in a way that's more accessible to a much wider array of users?
Because perps are actually pretty cool. Like you can do things that you can't do with any other
type of investment contract, at least in crypto with them. You can trade with leverage, you can
trade anything across chains really easily, potentially even real world assets. And so we've been putting a lot of efforts.
And one of the things we just released recently, is a more simple and more streamlined type of
trading experience that's mobile first, and designs to just attract a lot more types of users,
and be accessible to people
that are even just used to,
you know, using more of a Uniswap style swap experience.
So that's something that we released recently
and excited about.
Then, and we touched on a lot of these other things
that are more future looking,
things like spot trading,
things like multi-collateral farther into the future.
You know, we didn't touch as much on it in this call, but another thing that we're excited to hopefully
work together on at some point is more adding of the EVM to the DYDX chain and making the chain
really extensible, but also integrate really directly with the cool unique stuff that the
DYDX chain does in order books
in a purpose platform. So there's a lot of exciting things coming up, but overall for the next few
months, we're just laser focused on making DYDX the best possible product for pro traders to use in
DeFi. That's really cool. That's awesome. And that's very exciting about the EVM too. I've seen a lot of this where app chains have a really
strong core, uh, you know, ability or, or core use case. And then they, they, uh, the way that
they grow is they extend that and they add it that they provide that for other applications,
which is, I think a great way to scale. Yeah, exactly. And that's the reason I'm excited about
it too. Like, I think all of these like chains or whatever, if they're a new L1 and, you know, they're like, we're going to be like the new hub of DeFi or whatever, like it's kind of bullshit a little bit in my opinion. I'm not calling any one particular player out because a lot of people are kind of doing this and it's like, cool. Like you can have your Uniswap clone and your like Aave lending clone and all this kind of stuff,
but who really cares?
It's like there are already tens of other chains doing those things, and it's really
hard to build liquidity.
And I totally agree with you that still having the EVM on a special purpose chain is really
interesting.
And there absolutely may be, that may make it extensible to new types of spot pools or
may be that may make it extensible to new types of spot pools or new types of lending pools. But
new types of lending pools.
the interesting stuff happens when it can integrate directly with the cool custom stuff that may exist
on a chain. And that's really what the DYDX chain does have in this kind of off-chain really
performance. Order book structure in having these perp markets, in having, you know, kind of native
at some point in the near future, order book based spot markets, and then just allowing these things to be really extensible.
And so people could build things like, hey, I want like my own AMM pool on top of that that integrates directly with market makers and into this order book.
Or, hey, I want my own kind of vault strategy that trades in a particular way.
And that kind of stuff is really only possible if you have, if you're building on a chain
with some kind of custom infrastructure that already exists.
Yeah, that's really cool.
I'm excited for that.
Well, I don't want to keep you too long.
Antonio, it's really great to have you up.
Very excited for all the stuff you guys are working on.
Very happy to have you,. Very excited for all the stuff you guys are working on. Very happy to have you folks in the ecosystem.
I want to give maybe just one minute just to see if there's one or two questions from the crowd.
Otherwise, we can go to the end.
Any questions from the community?
All right. Usually there's not. Awesome. Antonio, thank you so much. Looking forward to working together more, especially around Eureka and all the cool things that can enable on DYDX.
And yeah, thanks again for coming on. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate
all the good questions and very excited to continue working together going forwards. Thanks, guys. See ya. Thank you.
