SotN #41: Scaling DeFi with dYdX and StarkWare

Antonio Juliano is Founder of dYdX, and Uri Kolodny is CEO of StarkWare.

State of the Nation is live-streamed on Tuesdays at 11am PT.

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State of the Nation #41: Scaling DeFi
Guests: Antonio Juliano & Uri Kolodny

Antonio Juliano (founder of dYdX) and Uri Kolodny (CEO of StarkWare) join this edition of State of the Nation to discuss their new announcement: dYdX, in partnership with StarkWare, recently released a Layer 2 Product for Perpetual Contracts, which namely allows for leveraged trading.

Perpetual Contracts expose investors to a synthetic contract, representing the price action of a given asset. The nature of perpetual contracts allow for flexibility and expression in the financial mechanisms powering the contract, giving traders the ability to use leverage. These types of contracts attract high-level, high-frequency traders and make scalability crucial for a platform to be capital-efficient.

StarkEx is StarkWare's scalability app, which uses StarkWare's Cairo, a Turing Complete coding platform, to support Layer 2 Scaling for transfers, trading, derivatives, and NFTs. dYdX rebuilt its interface, backend, and order-book; it then paired with StarkEx to create a scaled, decentralized derivatives exchange. Throughout the development and launch of its new product, dYdX has continued to emphasize the DeFi core values of being non-custodial, trustless, and permissionless.

A major upgrade is cross-margining on dYdX, which allows users to provide universal collateral, instead of having to provide collateral for each market. Other improvements include lower gas prices, increased oracle performance, higher maximum leverage, and no minimum trade size. With these upgrades, dYdX offers better performance with no loss in decentralization or security.

This is how DeFi needs to scale – increasing performance while maintaining decentralization and security.

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Resources:

dYdX Announcement Post:
https://dydx.exchange/blog/public

dYdX:
https://dydx.exchange/

StarkWare:
https://starkware.co/

Antonio on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AntonioMJuliano?s=20

Uri on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ukolodny?s=20

An Incomplete Guide to Rollups:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

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