DYdX Slashes Workforce By 35% Despite Bullish Crypto Market

DYdX, a top five decentralized perpetuals exchange, is laying off more than one-third of its staff.

On Oct. 29, Antonio Juliano, the CEO and founder of dYdX, announced the project is letting go of 35% of its core team. Juliano attributed the move to misalignment between the company’s strategic objectives and the existing structure of dYdX.

“Today, I made the incredibly difficult decision to lay off 35% of the dYdX core team,” Juliano wrote in a blog post. “The decision to let go was a realization that the company we’ve built is different from the company dYdX must be.”

The news comes despite dYdX gearing up for its ‘Unlimited’ upgrade. Unlimited will introduce permissionless market listings and MegaVault, a master liquidity pool providing liquidity for supported markets. The update also includes a permissioned keys feature to bolster user security.

Juliano resumed his role as dYdX’s chief executive on Oct. 10 after a hiatus.

Crypto layoffs return

The announcement coincided with Consensys, the Ethereum software development company behind the popular wallet MetaMask, laid off 20% of its staff.

Joe Lubin, the founder and CEO of Consensys, attributed the move to “broader macroeconomic conditions” and “ongoing regulatory uncertainty,” necessitating a more “agile” organization for Consensys to remain competitive.

Matter Labs, the team behind the ZKsync Layer 2 network, also reduced its workforce by 16% last month.

The hefty crypto layoffs come despite the broader crypto markets appearing bullish, especially in comparison to the 2022 bear trend that culminated in roughly 24,000 layoffs across the crypto sector, according to the legal firm, Bressler, Amery & Ross.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP — the four largest non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market cap — are sitting on 12-month gains of between 49% and 406%, while the combined capitalization of digital assets is up 47% year-to-date, according to CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, BTC last changed hands for $72,330, just 2.1% shy of its all-time high.

DYdX dominance wanes

However, dYdX's once dominant share of the DEX derivatives market has recently been eroded by rivals.

DYdX currently ranks fourth by weekly trade volume with $2.95 billion, lagging behind Hyperliquid with $7.69 billion, Jupiter with $4.71, and SynFutures with $3.37 billion, according to DeFi Llama.

DYdX also ranks sixth by total value locked (TVL) with $287.5 million after a 17% decline in 2024, while Hyperliquid boasts the top spot with 857% after year-to-date growth of 250%.

DYdX’s decline appears to have accelerated since the project was hit by a domain name service (DNS) attack in July. Attackers compromised the exchange’s front-end web domain and duped users into transferring assets to malicious addresses.

DYdX v3 sunset

On Oct. 30, dYdX also completed the sun setting of its v3 iteration.

The process began on Oct. 28, when oracle price updates, trading, and funding were halted. On Oct. 30, its smart contracts recorded the exchange as frozen, preventing any exchange account balance updates.

However, users can still withdraw their USDC balances from v3’s smart contracts, owing to the protocol’s implementation of validity proofs, colloquially described as achieving Stage 1 decentralization.

The sunsetting of v3 will not impact the platform’s flagship dYdX v4 exchange.