DEX Ed

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TBI - December 18, 2018

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have burst to the forefront of the cryptocurrency scene, and have been met with various SEC actions, protocol forks, and hacks.

Aside from stablecoins, I think DEX may be the most promising, near-term useful innovation to come out of the last crypto market cycle. DEX protocols will need to undergo a considerable degree of iteration and maturation, but perhaps there is strength in numbers; of the 250+ DEX players (protocols, relayers, oracles, etc.) being built today, many will fail, but they will collectively increase the surface area and volume of cryptocurrency exchange.

DEX’s have a lot to prove if they are to take liquidity from centralized counterparts. The present and future utility of DEXs is still up for debate amongst cryptocurrency investors. The current UIs leave something to be desired. Every DEX is engineered differently, and the trade-offs of each platform might also be lost on an average user. And most importantly, there’s that whole liquidity thing. (We’ve written about the current state of infrastructure back in early October. And why improving latency is the gating item to introducing liquidity to DEX order books.)

It can be hard to keep up, and if you blinked, you may have missed the fact that the largest relayer (DDEX) just forked away from the largest DEX protocol (0x) to its own token last week.

DDEX Founder Tian Li (on Medium):