So what I really don't get about the decentralized fans: They repeatedly say, our goal is to replace entities like DEX.
But replace with what? With people like Vitalik? He seems to be an influential figure and calling the shots. How is this in any way different than a "normal" company with a CEO and a board.
We already have functional, audited, open source DEXes and have had them for years now.
Uniswap was the first well-done AMM (automated market maker) design. It's on version 3 now, and has traded more than $1.2 trillion in volume: https://uniswap.org/
FTX was primarily used for perpetuals trading, which is a type of leveraged derivative product. Popular decentralized perp products include:
GMX: https://gmx.io/#/
and Dydx: https://dydx.exchange/
Vitalik is certainly influential, and he did conceive of and invent the first smart contract blockchain, but he doesn't call the shots any more than Tim Berners-Lee controls the web.
I love uniswap as a concept. Whatever my reservations are about crypto, there are some projects I think are good, uniswap being one of them. Staying true to the decentralized aspects and all that. What I dont understand is, if we have uniswap, why are there other exchanges coming in and establishing a big market. Is it a UX thing? Or is the crypto ecosystem addicted to leveraged trading? If I was a crypto person I would definitely be in favor of more uniswap and less coinbase and binance.
Partly UX, partly marketing, partly L1 fees and speed. Partly that a lot of people don’t know what Uniswap is. It gets a passing mention in the news if lucky, or more likely no mention, even though it’s the second largest crypto exchange on some days. Most crypto CEX investors are either unaware or too lazy to care.
A lot of crypto people do use Uniswap. The tone of Vitalik’s post is: what if we took some of the non custodial, on-chain, cryptographic proof things that work well in a DEX, and inject them into more CEXes so that even lazy users end up with better security guarantees.
It's partly a UX thing, uniswap can be expensive at certain times. This is beind worked on actively with rollups. But there is still more work to do.
It's partly also because you have to bridge from traditional finance to cryptocurrency somehow. Many of these centralized exchanges are allowing that bridging. Usually that would involve meeting strict banking and KYC regulations. FTX decided that was too much of a hassle and incorporated in Bahamas to avoid it.
I feel like the whole KYC and liquidation to fiat should be handled by token issuers and not exchanges. USDT should be responsible to give me cash USD, not binance or coinbase.
Ideally, open-sourced & audited smart contracts that are ERC-compliant & developed by the general public, with the internal mechanisms made viewable to anyone that wants to learn how such mechanisms work.
> With people like Vitalik? He seems to be an influential figure and calling the shots.
Vitalik can point at where focus could be targeted at, but the decision is ultimately up to the developers themselves. In fact, as far as I can remember, most of the efforts mentioned in the post & image below are not publicly mentioned at all, with other developers leading the charge on that front. (Danksharding being one example, with the development efforts led by Dankrad Feist, hence the name.)
> How is this in any way different than a "normal" company with a CEO and a board?
The main difference is that development is not wholly left to one party: Anyone can choose to develop the applications that they want to see & deploy them onto the platform. Even if you're external from the main development efforts, you can still contribute to the overall ecosystem with code contributions towards one of the various nodes of the entire system. This stands in contrast with a standard company, where external development's forbidden outside of a special area designated for the general public to interact with.
The curtains are slowly getting pulled aside for the "crypto" ecosystem. Tokens on tokens on centralized or non-scaling systems that generate "yield" without really specifying where the yield comes from. Vitalik is indeed a CEO or CTO for the Ethereum Foundation, which in itself is a cetralized entity calling the shots for the development path, including changes to the emission of ETH.
I fully expect that system to come crashing down in 5-10 year.
Vitalik isn’t running any DEXes, he is not in a position where he can steal or move user funds locked into a DeFi contract. He could suggest a change that might do something malicious at protocol level, but the rest of the developer community would reject it.
CEO of a bank can't do that too. The board can though. And of course customers can reject that decision and switch bank. But in reality that won't happen both in the bank case and in the tokenbro case. We have already saw how Vitalik stole lawful tokens from the receiver of The DAO program (code is law after all), and everyone has supported him. Exactly the same as banks can do, only without outlandish claims.
A double spend attack is a type of fraud for sure, but obviously one of the remedies for a double spend attack is to fork the main chain and change the consensus to nerf the attack.
Ultimately layer 0 of a blockchain is the community that uses it, and if they decide to fork en masse, they will do so. It's an essential property of the system itself. Blockchains would not be antifragile if they could not fork.
Then the problem becomes the same, who is empowered with calling a fork? If they are just by users who are using it, how is it different than having an election etc.? Except here the agenda comes from a shadow organization within a "decentralized" system. I would much rather my votes happen in public with everyone's consent.
I don't see how double spending and forks are the same thing. Double spending is when the same coin is spent twice on the same chain. When you fork, you are creating a whole new future history (sorry, can't come up with a better word). If I have a ledger for my business, and someone created a copy and added different transactions to it, that would not be double spending, right?
Nothing really got stolen in the DAO case the way I see it. ETC still exists, its just that nobody wants to use that chain. Code is still law, but the users decide which code to run. I can see the beauty in it.
But replace with what? With people like Vitalik? He seems to be an influential figure and calling the shots. How is this in any way different than a "normal" company with a CEO and a board.