The concept of centralized exchanges contravenes every founding principle of crypto — decentralization, anonymization, and security. They’re not decentralized — you don’t hold the keys, which means you don’t hold the coin. They’re not anonymous — the vast majority require KYC. And they’re insecure — more than 980,000 BTC — over $7.8 billion at today’s rate — have been stolen from centralized exchanges.

By their very nature, centralized exchanges continue to be an attractive target to some of the very best hackers on the internet. The Mt. Gox hack alone lost 6% (!) of all Bitcoin in circulation at the time. In the first three months of 2018, $534m in NEM was stolen from Coincheck, $195m of crypto from Bitgrail, and $3.3 million from CoinSecure.

This is where decentralized exchanges (DEXs) come in: anonymous, secure, and trustless. With fully decentralized exchanges such as The Token Store, funds are deposited into a smart contract, instead of being directly deposited in an exchange. Fully decentralized exchanges have no way of removing funds from the smart contract — only the person who holds the private key of the Ethereum account that sent funds there can retrieve it. Moreover, no sign-up or email addresses are needed to use a fully decentralized exchange: the best way to use The Token Store is through MetaMask. This makes the experience completely anonymous. With centralized exchanges under persistent attack by bad actors and regulators, the lack of liquidity which DEXs are facing is likely to be gradually solved.

When it comes to DEXs, The Token Store stands out. The Token Store is a fully decentralized exchange built on the Ethereum network. It’s cheaper than its rivals (0% trading fee for market makers ), contains few of the annoyances that plagued the first generation of DEXs, and offers a much cleaner experience. EtherDelta used to be the dominant DEX, but serious bugs and poor code rendered it unusable: this is how ForkDelta came about, but continued bugs and UI issues make the user experience tedious and unreliable. The vulnerability of ‘semi-decentralized’ exchanges was exposed with the Bancor hack. The experience offered by The Token Store is simple, but also smooth and secure.

The fees at The Token Store are also simple and transparent; market makers (traders who place limit orders in the orderbook, instead of taking someone else’s order) are charged a 0% trading fee, and do not pay a gas fee and market takers (traders who take someone else’s order) must pay only the taker trading fee (0.3%) and gas (which goes to miners on the Ethereum network). Centralized exchanges usually have high withdrawal and deposit fees (The Token Store doesn’t have any) and DEXs which use liquidity pools often have hidden costs.

Also of note is the flexibility DEXs offer. The Token Store now supports the trading of any ERC20 token by contract address: this means that tokens don’t have to be listed anywhere for them to be traded. Traders may gain a significant advantage by using this feature by being able to start trading before most people do when the token is listed. This makes trading much less rigid and more accessible than on centralized exchanges.

DEXs are the answer if you want your funds to be safe and if you’d rather preserve your anonymity on the web. I recommend checking out The Token Store for a start, since it offers the cleanest, most efficient product on the market at a good price.