dYdX buys its way into social-first perps trading by hiring an entire team at once

Instead of headhunting, dYdX bought the whole company. Pocket Protector’s lean team scaled to $1 billion in volume in under a year; now, they’re embedded in the decentralized exchange’s core, rewriting the playbook for DEX trading.

On July 18, dYdX founder and CEO Antonio Juliano announced that the decentralized exchange had acquired Pocket Protector, a small but fast-moving startup known for its Telegram-native perps and Solana spot trading app.

The deal, which quietly closed in the second quarter, brings Pocket Protector’s co-founders Eddie Zhang and Kaiser Kinbote into dYdX as President and Head of Growth, respectively, along with four engineers.

While the terms were undisclosed, Juliano said the transaction was funded with a mix of cash and dYdX tokens. The acquisition marks dYdX’s first external buy and follows an internal restructuring aimed at sharpening its execution muscle and accelerating product expansion.

The social trading edge dYdX couldn’t build alone

The Pocket Protector acquisition can be seen as a strategic purchase of time, executional firepower, and a proven mentality that dYdX believes it needs to scale through a new competitive phase in decentralized trading.

Pocket Protector’s team achieved in months what most DeFi projects struggle with for years: creating a sticky, social trading experience that users actually wanted. Their Telegram-native app, which let traders follow each other’s moves and share strategies in real time, amassed 50,000 users and topped $1 billion in annualized volume before most competitors even noticed.

That kind of viral traction is rare in DeFi, where liquidity often follows mercenary yield farmers rather than engaged communities.

The team’s integration speaks volumes about dYdX’s priorities. Eddie Zhang, who led product at Meta’s Messenger before co-founding Pocket Protector, is stepping in as President, effectively becoming Juliano’s right hand on product execution.

Kaiser Kinbote, a crypto-native growth expert, will oversee user acquisition and retention, two areas where dYdX has historically lagged behind centralized rivals. Their four engineers will embed directly into dYdX’s core development teams, suggesting their work won’t be siloed as a side project.

What comes next hinges on execution. dYdX has already begun porting Pocket Protector’s Telegram bot functionality to its platform, a move that could make its perps market feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a trading floor.

But the real test will be whether the team’s social-first DNA can thrive inside a protocol that has spent years optimizing for decentralization and capital efficiency. If they succeed, dYdX won’t just be the biggest decentralized perps exchange. It might be the first one that traders actually enjoy using.