Can dYdX Become a Decentralized BitMEX? How It Is Scaling With StarkWare - Ep.218

Episode • Mar 9, 2021 • 1h 10m

Antonio Juliano, founder of the decentralized exchange dYdX, and Eli Ben-Sasson, cofounder of StarkWare, discuss the recent launch of dYdX on Ethereum layer 2 using StarkWare’s scaling technology. In this episode, they cover:

what cross-margin perpetual trading is and why dYdX chose StarkWare to be its scaling partner (1:13)
ZK rollups and how they contrast with optimistic rollups (8:49)
how many transactions per second StarkWare can handle through its layer 2 solution (16:57)
lessons learned and critical takeaways from their six months spent working together (20:15)
the similarities between Ethereum and StarkNet (26:07)
why Antonio believes that scalability is more important than composability (27:30)
the benefits of decentralized exchanges and how dYdX fits into the dex marketplace (31:54)
why dYdX chose Chainlink as its oracle provider, and how it got oracle prices onto layer 2, which previously had none (38:11)
why Cairo, StarkWare’s Turing-complete programming language and platform, can be the “one verifier to rule them all” (42:10)
what it was like for StarkWare to compete in the Great Reddit Scaling Bake-Off (45:41)
whether or not DeFi could handle a GameStop/Robinhood situation (48:56)
fair launch tokens versus VC tokens (54:12)
the likelihood of dYdX and StarkWare each creating a token (58:19)
upcoming developments and projects for both companies (1:02:14)