I attended a meetup hosted by Kingston Blockchainers on decentralized exchanges the other day. They hosted Connor Herman of Radar Relay, who spoke on the state of the decentralized exchange space and some different exchange and scalability approaches. Currently, Radar Relay only exchanges ERC20 tokens, but it sounded like they may support exchange of other token standards in the future. The Radar Relay project is run on the 0x Protocol.
One of the interesting concepts we talked about was the idea of liquidity in the market, particularly in less known/used coins. Part of what a relayer does and can do is list exchange contracts or offers from not only their customers, but other relayers as well. The other interesting aspect of this was that because you can trade directly from your wallet, there is no loss of token control to any central wallet hot/cold/hardware or otherwise outside of your control until the exchange happens. This also allows for liquidity to be built up in the market throughout relayers (hopefully) hosting as many contracts as possible and could lower barriers of entry into the exchange of a wider variety of token pairs. Also, because this exchange is simply a peer to peer exchange executed through smart contracts, no KYC AML is required (disclaimer: currently...).
I've also seen a lot of posts recently about getting SBD listed on exchanges, which I agree needs to happen in order for the project to expand - tokens need to be liquid somehow to be useful. I know that currently Radar Relay doesn't work for SBD (correct me if I'm wrong on that though), but the concept of relayers was new to me and made me think about what this might mean for the overall space as a decentralized exchange approach.
What decentralized (or centralized) exchanges do you favour and why? Are there cool projects doing anything similar that you know of? Drop them in the comments!
Thanks for reading!