Crypto exchanges are starting to shut down or delisting tokens, whether its liquidity problems or security problems, 2019 will be a year of cleansing.
There are 277 exchanges according to Coingecko at the moment, in the end of 2019 the number will be probably way lower.
Recently Cryptopia got hacked and once again millions of funds get stolen, it became something regularly, it's no longer surprising when an exchange gets hacked. Every year Millions of dollars get stolen proving that security is a major concern in the crypto industry. There will always be attempts of hacks while people still use centralized exchanges.
The phishing crypto websites its one of the most popular ways of stealing crypto funds by deceiving users in giving private keys and other user data. It was released a report from independent analysts from ICORating classifying the crypto exchanges by grades.
The only way to move forward with security, trust, and transparency is with decentralized exchanges, that's the step that the crypto industry must do to ensure a good market environment without constant news of hacks and shady stuff happening to less known crypto exchanges.
Decentralized exchanges
Currenly there are a few players in the market that already provide a decentralized service but almost all are not user-friendly, i personally have tried Idex, Bancor, Kyber, Ethfinex, Aphelion, Waves and Switcheo. The best one is by far Switcheo with the best UI, the best user experience, it lacks liquidity that's a problem for new users, although the team has plans to change that like providing market makers with a rebate program and more coming in the next weeks. There is also the problem of fiat, there are very few players in the space in control of fiat integrations and that creates monopolies and higher fees, and once again Switcheo is implementing fiat in q1 2019 and that's a massive step for a decentralized exchange to bring every step closer to a one and all exchange.
Interoperability is still one of the many problems of the crypto industry, the lack of digital communication between different blockchains, is creating a barrier for the user experience, that's also one of the problems that decentralized exchanges are trying to solve, that centralized exchanges don't have, but Switcheo has already solved that problem for the ethereum blockchain, it's allowing trading between erc20 and nep5 tokens at the moment.
Switcheo has so much planned for 2019 from fiat integration, to fully achieving interoperability between multiple blockchains, to email-login, from having all the features of the NEO V3 contract and having their own sidechain on NEO to have better performance.
A year ago i would agree that we needed better user experience for decentralized exchanges to reach the market but now with Switcheo proving itself to the market, it's really a no brainer why Switcheo doesn't have Waves or any other major exchange volume.
The landscape will turn to decentralized exchanges with Binance Dex moving closer to the release date and other much anticipated DEX like Nash exchange. We need a world more decentralized, let's start with exchanges.