What is a decentralized exchange and why does it matter?

Recently we have seen a shift in the exchanges sentiment, we had too much-centralized systems in 2017 to trade our coins, but with all the security issues in the crypto industry with so many exchanges being hacked and losing funds, it begs the question how safe the user’s funds are. How is a decentralized exchange any different from a centralized exchange? First, a DEX doesn’t hold customers funds so there is no risk of theft, and for many users that value privacy decentralized exchanges don’t require the know your customer procedure, although that may be about to change with recent news on SEC coming after Etherdelta founder. Essentially a DEX is an exchange that allows peer-to-peer trading. There is a race going on to see who the market leader in DEXs will be, with Binance joining the race in 2019 with their beta DEX.

Why should an investor care about this difference? Its simple from my experience trading with centralized exchanges such as Binance, Kucoin, Huobi, Bibox, HitBTC, Bitfinex, Bittrex, and many others, I have had my share of issues with all of these from having deposit/withdraw issues, Balances not showing and holding my deposits. All these issues started to change my perspective on how we trust these exchanges to essentially hold our money and keep it safe. I share my worst experience with Kucoin, although they have a variety of coins listed their velocity in solving problems is a concerning issue, when NEO recently had problems with a spam attack on the network and the short-term solution was to add a drop of gas, Kucoin didn’t act fast enough, so for more than a week users had their NEOs held without being able to trade or withdraw. Well you may think that a week doesn’t sound that much but it is in the crypto market movements tend to act way faster than in traditional markets, so imagine losing 15% of the money without being able to trade it and not get compensated about the time or the devaluation of the coin.

What is Switcheo? And how are they changing the game?

Let’s start with a brief explanation of the Switcheo creation, the team is based in Singapore and in December of 2017, the Switcheo project won a dApp competition hosted by the City of Zion, an open-source community of developers of NEO. They held their ICO in March of 2018 and they raised a total of $8.7 million within 24 hours and they went live a few days later. Since then Switcheo has listed more than 25 NEO projects and has achieved 25300 traders from around the world.

Switcheo is the first decentralized exchanged running on NEO, they have had the first mover advantage in creating a brilliant product with an amazing user-interface, a very fast deposit/withdraw mechanism and the trading runs very fast and smooth while having limit orders and market orders. The team is very communicative on their telegram with their Co-Founder and CEO Ivan Poon coming so often to receive feedback from users an investors, until very recently they had the weekly-round up to share all the development that was being done behind the scenes, they stopped because of the development in cross-chain that was being made that would take longer and would be the same working development on the next weekly updates. They now have an email news for the exchange users that want to be in touch with all the recent development. Switcheo has trading competitions for every new listing for a period with prizes for the top places and they have held other events for developers, traders, and designers.

Why is Callisto update their biggest announcement?

The Callisto update will allow users to trade eth pairs in Switcheo DEX making it the first decentralized exchange with atomic swaps and cross-chain in the NEO platform allowing interoperability between blockchains. They released their beta for the Callisto update with 3 eth pairs https://beta.switcheo.exchange, and it’s absolutely amazing the trading experience, in late 2017 and early 2018 many DEXs had awful UI and user experience, that was and still is a huge barrier for many people, that’s why DEXs have low liquidity because the existent DEXs have the worst trading experience than centralized exchanges, that’s where Switcheo disrupts the ecosystem and releases an excellent working product. This changes everything for the decentralized exchanges and makes Switcheo the market leader by having the first moving advantage. In the upcoming weeks, they will release their Callisto update with 20 pairs of the Ethereum blockchain.

Switcheo mission and goal is to enable trustless transfers across blockchains in a practical manner and delivering a world-class trading experience without compromising on trustlessness.

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Disclaimer: Im very passionate about new tech. Im an entrepreneur with a background in finance. Im not a financial adviser and this article do not consist of investment advice, this is only my opinion.