The token economy is the trend of the future finance industry. The cryptocurrency exchanges are going viral and have been established around the world. According to the operation mode, it can be defined into two kinds: centralized and decentralized.
The advantages of centralized exchange are its complete customer service, easy-manipulated UI, speedy turnover-rate, and so on. Users only need to invest funds, and other complicated procedures can be manipulated by the exchange on behalf of them. Some famous exchanges such as Bitfinex, Bittrex, Binance, BitMEX, GDAX, OKEx are all centralized examples.
However, the advantages of centralized exchanges are its risk part as well. The users’ assets and identity information are stored in the exchange’s database. Once the database been attacked, all the data will possibly be exposed in a highly dangerous situation, and all the information and assets might be hacked and stolen.
A famous cryptocurrency exchange from South Korea, YouBit, had been hacked twice since April in 2017. This causes YouBit lost 40% of their assets and nearly faced bankruptcy. Coincheck is another case from Japan. They were been hacked and lost approximately 510 million USD in January 2018. Therefore, centralized exchanges are highly convenient but also very risky and should no longer be the mainstream for cryptocurrency trading. Under this condition, the decentralized exchange rises.
In the decentralized exchange, users don’t need to register nor provide any personal information, so personal privacy is completely protected.