Decentralized Exchanges

Decentralized Exchanges; These have no KYC requirements whatsoever and you don’t need to put in any personal info to trade. Just hold that token in your wallet and typically allow one to buy tens of thousands of different tokens.

Benefits:

  • Private

  • You have full control over your coins and they are not stored by a central source that could go out of biz or lock you out of your coins

  • LP Mining rewards. Holding on a CEX doesn't allow any passive income & staking on a CEX disqualifies you from any special airdrops. The LP mining rewards would never be seen on a CEX.

Negatives:

  • Anyone can create DEX with buying a domain name and using a template. This has led to tons of copycat DEX’s that just have a different name and no new features. These have a higher chance to rug pull. Found on BSC and ETH where it's easier to fork a project.

  • LP Mining rewards: Also have a downside as there is something called impermanent loss. If price of one coin moons you'll see your LP holding of that coin go down. The LP mining rewards if held and staked can make up for this along with leaving liquidity in the pool if you see IL and the price goes back down.

  • DEX’s that have vulnerabilities in their code open the door up for hackers. CEX's as well but DEX's have a higher chance of this, especially newer ones or ones with brand new advanced trading features.

  • Easy to stay anon. Dev’s can rug pull and run off with all the money and not face charges or conquences. Rug pulls remove the almost all the liquidity thus tanking the price and not allowing anyone to sell or buy

Examples:

Osmosis: The first Cosmos based DEX that supports IBC. Each coin listed has it's own sovigern blockchain. Zero fee's right now, fair launched without VC or Team unlocks, High APY liquidity mining early on. Quality > Quantity. Also amazing staking rewards right now like 155% a year.

Sifchain: Another Cosmos based IBC DEX that also has an Ethereum chain bridge and supports quite a few ETH projects. High fees to import ETH tokens but I don't blame Sifchain for that. Quite new and has great Liquidiy Mining rewards at the moment with special bonus LP boosted pools. Also trades on Etherum as $EROWAN and some Polygon based DEX's. I haven't done anything on those so don't have much to say there. There is VC investors and token unlocks which lead to some selling pressure short term. Long term I think it has huge potential and don't focus on the short term price swings.

Pancakeswap - The goto DEX on the BSC. Lower fees than ETH DEX's. Allows for trading of any project including brand new ones that have any amount of liquidity.

Uniswap - Haven't really used this one tbh. The fee's are typically quite high and would take up a large part of my weekly budget.

WindSwap - Turned out to be a rug pull.