2018 is the year of decentralized exchanges

I predict that 2018 will be the year of decentralized exchanges and inter-blockchain love.

We already have a few decentralized exchanges that let you trade Ethereum based tokens e.g. the recently hacked and now sold Etherdelta (caution: use it at your own risk), recently launched Radar Relay, and IDEX asset exchange. Plus Waves blockchain has had its own decentralized exchange trading Waves, Bitcoin, tethered currency tokens, and other Waves tokens. There is also Counterparty powered wallets like Counterwallet which grew up in the pre-Ethereum days.

Now we have a new generation of solutions ranging from the Stellar blockchain that aims to enable any-to-any coin exchanges, and NVO.io. Not to mention entire blockchains designed around being the hub for other blockchains to talk to each other although not specifically as engines for trading - e.g. Cosmos and Polkadot.

The latest kid on the block seems to be altcoin.io which bills itself as

"A truly decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. Powered by Atomic Swaps."

According to their diagram, it appears to utilized Raiden, pegged and native reserves, plus IPFS:

Not being tied to only Ethereum tokens means it should handle trading between blockchains which is so far reasonably rare in the decentralized world - so ETH for BTC, or STEEM for BTC etc.

They are running a referral program so if you can get 10 people to sign up that will give you 5% of those people's fees when they trade. That sounds pretty generous to me - lets hope this site is legit, works well, and is launched soon. I'm so sick of dodging bullets when using places like Etherdelta!

The main problem with all these decentralized exchanges will be ensuring there is liquidity. They need to be able to show and fill orders using other (decentralized) exchanges by some kind of federation mechanism. That should be huge for trading and give users a lot of security - so long as there are no security bugs in their code (remember the Parity wallet hacks?), or weaknesses outside of the blockchain like the DNS based hack of Etherdelta