With the news that the Dept of Extortion & Making Things Suck is going to be trying to pry into our crypto business (you know, for the children), I decided I would start moving to Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) to trade my crypto. More than that, centralized exchanges are popular targets for hacking, DDos attacks and run-aways.
There is also the reality that centralized exchanges are fundamentally opposed to the reasons we value decentralized crypto-assets in the first place.
There are not a lot of choices in the space as of yet. Most of the choices we do have are new, in beta or not even released yet. There are more decentralized exchanges than the ones I am listing here, but these are what I see as the best we have. I would love to see more and I really would like to see these get more action than they seem to be getting.
I think the convenience of centralized exchanges and of course the lack of time tested decentralized exchanges is keeping people from building deeper markets in the decentralized exchanges.
- OpenLedger: Built on Bitshares. This is the one I am starting with. It is easy to get started with and there is no Know Your Customer (KYC). Future plans include Atomic Swaps. The volume is not very great, at least in the assets, such as SBD and Steem that I am trading in.
- Waves: Features decentralized trading with a centralized matching service, which adds liquidity.
- CryptoBridge: Also built on Bitshares. As best I can tell, this is very similar to OpenLedger. The interface even looks very similar.
- BarterDEX: This is a very interesting project which is not yet launched for the general public. BarterDEX uses Atomic Swaps and Electrum servers which in a nutshell means additional liquidity features and very fast trades which do not require downloading blockchains.
OpenLedger and CryptoBridge are built on Graphene which allows for huge transaction volumes. I have seen estimates of up to 100,000 per second.
Have you tried any of these? Am I missing any noteworthy decentralized exchanges?
