everything you need to know about DEX's, METERIA and GIL

lets start with the basics:

In any transaction a third party entity would normally oversee the security and transfer of assets (e.g. banks) these are centralised exchanges. decentralized exchanges substitute these 3rd party entity's for a blockchain or distributed ledger.

block chains can act as a 3rd party with the use of smart contracts or order book relaying, although many other variations are possible and with differing degrees of decentralization.

Because users do not need to transfer their assets to the exchange, decentralized exchanges reduce the risk of theft from hacking of exchanges. Decentralized exchanges can also prevent price manipulation or faked trading volume through wash trading, and are more anonymous than exchanges which implement know your customer (KYC) requirements.

There are some signs that decentralized exchanges have been suffering from low trading volumes and market liquidity. The 0x project, a protocol for building decentralized exchanges with interchangeable liquidity attempts to solve this issue.

understand? ok good, lets look a bit deeper:

A DEX is a exchange that you access through WEB3 wallets. For instance, I use a MetaMask wallet to connect to the Materia DEX. More examples of DEX are Uniswap and 1inch. The inversion of a DEX is a centralized exchange, like Binance and Crypto.com

GIL is the governance token of MateriaDex

it is deployed as a decentralized flexible organization, meaning that GIL holders will ultimately vote and decide (according to holding weight) what to do with the exchange and which changes or additions to enact.
This is one of Materia's competitive advantages to an exchange like Uniswap, because theoretically any GIL holder can implement propositions and vote to modify the Materia ecosystem.

As an inversion of this, for example, the Uniswap team and not its token holders make changes to their DEX. A centralized body decides what changes are made to Uniswap.