TL;DR: Cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx recently released its 2020 roadmap for CoinEx Chain, its public, decentralized (DEX) version. The Hong Kong-based company’s highly-anticipated DEX looks to focus on so-called Smart Chain development and an eventual hard fork of the CoinEx product, Atlantis.

CoinEx Chain Releases 2020 Roadmap

“According to the roadmap,” the announcement explained, “the team will develop a demo of Smart Chain in February and launch a new version of the block explorer in March with an API interface for the convenience of wallet access.” By March, a full hard fork, dubbed Atlantis, will give the DEX a load of features which include modifying trading pair rules and commissions, Bancor smart token pairs, on-chain order storage duration, wallet application developer incentives, validator and client block rewards, and a specification for wallets to interact through QR codes.

Decentralized exchanges are increasing in popularity at almost the exact proportion to that of more financial regulatory scrutiny across the world. And while most crypto exchanges welcome industry-driven security and organically arrived at operating procedures, governments are keen to slow crypto’s rise for innumerable reasons. If there is a team to hold accountable, an office to close or raid, regulators are emboldened to shove ever-more barriers onto the nascent ecosystem in favor of legacy finance patrons.

Co-founder and CEO Haipo Yang spent a good deal of last year outlining plans for CoinEx Chain. That work appears to be accelerating in 2020. “In the second quarter,” the exchange forecasted, “CoinEx Chain will support cross-chain protocol in April and complete the development of the Smart Chain virtual machine, and plans to support the transfer of tokens between DEX and the Smart Chain in May so that users will be free to trade CET [(its proprietary token)] on the two chains. Meanwhile, a new version of the DEX wallet will be launched.”

The goal is an eventual Smart Chain to enable what they’re calling “programmable currency,” as a “connection between the Smart Chain and the DEX Chain through a cross-chain mechanism guarantees the high processing performance of the DEX chain and can also support complex financial applications, such as Defi.” CoinEx Chain is based on the Tendermint consensus protocol and the Cosmos SDK, and has since gone on “to encourage more nodes, institutions and individuals to participate” through its CoinEx Chain Foundation and Support Program.

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