Dydx President Confirms Us Market Entry With Expanded Trading

What Happened

President Eddie Zhang confirmed the move in an interview with Reuters, adding that dYdX plans to slash trading fees by up to half across the board upon US launch.

Founder Antonio Juliano credited Zhang’s experience leading early Messenger development at Meta and launching consumer products as key factors in the acquisition.

Enhanced mobile interfaces rolled out to retail investors, while the web platform added new order types, including reduce-only limit orders, scale orders, and TWAP orders alongside funding rate payment history.

These upgrades supported $270 billion in trading volume and $46 million in net protocol fees across 150 markets during 2024 alone.

Market Context

Decentralized crypto exchange dYdX will enter the US market by year-end, offering spot trading on Solana and related cryptocurrencies, marking a strategic expansion for the derivatives-focused platform, which was previously unavailable to American users.

DYdX will reduce its trading fees to between 50 and 65 basis points upon entering the US market.

The San Francisco-based platform, which has recently surpassed $1.5 trillion in total trading volume since its inception, specializes in perpetual contracts. These derivatives allow traders to speculate on asset prices without ownership or expiration dates.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission indicated last month that they would consider allowing crypto perpetual contracts across regulated U.S. platforms.

The US expansion follows dYdX’s July acquisition of Pocket Protector, a Telegram-native trading app that attracted 50,000 users and reached $1 billion in annualized volume in under a year.

Pocket Protector’s core features, including Telegram-based perpetual and spot trading, are being integrated into dYdX’s leading platform.

The platform resolved critical stability issues during market volatility by assigning dedicated engineers to eliminate downtime and throughput constraints affecting its Indexer system.

The platform’s cumulative trading volume has surpassed $1.46 trillion since 2021, demonstrating sustained growth despite market fluctuations.

Why It Matters

The expansion follows President Donald Trump’s embrace of crypto this year, which triggered dismissals of lawsuits against major crypto platforms and prompted financial regulators to develop specialized digital asset rules.

Zhang emphasized the importance of US availability for the platform’s strategic direction going forward.

Details

Lower Fees, Higher Regulatory Barriers

While perpetual contracts won’t be available to US users initially, dYdX hopes regulators will eventually provide guidance for decentralized platforms to offer these products.

Zhang explained that, unlike centralized exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken that act as intermediaries, decentralized platforms like dYdX eliminate middlemen by allowing users to transact directly on blockchain networks.

Strategic Growth Through Acquisition and Infrastructure

Zhang joined as President through the deal, while co-founder Kaiser Kinbote became Head of Growth.

“He has strong product instincts, a track record of execution, and a rare ability to zoom between strategy and details,” Juliano wrote in a statement announcing the deal.

A four-person engineering team from Pocket Protector joined dYdX’s product and engineering divisions to support the integration and broader expansion efforts.

Platform Enhancements and Tokenomics Evolution

Beyond the acquisition, dYdX has implemented major infrastructure improvements throughout 2025.

Deposit and withdrawal times were reduced from 18 minutes to under one minute through the Skip integration.