Decentralized Exchange dYdX Acquires Social Trading App Pocket Protector

Decentralized exchange (DEX) dYdX said it bought Pocket Protector, a social-trading startup known for its Telegram-based trading bot. The financial details of the deal were not revealed.

The eight-year-old company known for its derivatives market also said it appointed Pocket Protector co-founder Eddie Zhang, who previously worked at Meta and Amazon, as its new president.

The purchase comes about a year after Bloomberg reported that dYdX was looking for a buyer itself.

The acquisition positions dYdX for its next phase of growth in the increasingly competitive decentralized finance (DeFi) derivatives market, pushing into social trading to compete with newer, more consumer-focused platforms, a dYdX representative said in an email. The exchange is the fifth-largest derivatives DEX by total value locked (TVL) according to DeFiLlama data.

Pocket Protector, founded in 2024 by Zhang and Kaiser Kinbote, lets users trade directly in group chats, a format that has drawn over 50,000 users and reached more than $1 billion in annualized trading volume in its first year. The platform is backed by Electric Capital and Dragonfly Capital.

Zhang previously worked on Messenger at Meta and co-founded the social app Fam, while Kinbote has invested in several early-stage crypto projects and brings experience in token design and community growth.

“These additions enable us to execute rapidly on an ambitious roadmap,” dYdX founder Antonio Juliano said in a statement. “Eddie’s founder mindset and product depth will help us ship powerful new experiences fast.”

DYdX will continue supporting Pocket Protector’s existing tools while planning tighter integration into its core platform. In a statement shared with CoinDesk, the company hinted at upcoming releases involving new trading protocols and user experiences.

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