Cryptocurrencies and decentralized technologies are booming. The numbers speak for themselves market capitalizations have gone through the roof, transaction volume has skyrocketed, and adoption from individuals, corporations, and governments has reached a global scale.
Thanks to blockchain technology, we are moving toward a trustless economy, with no need of third parties to exchange goods. Yet todays digital currency exchanges are centralized. They have proven to be vulnerable to hacks, to react poorly to unusual blockchain events like hard forks, and often run with a high regulatory risk. Centralized exchanges keep their systems off-chain, meaning they operate as escrows for their clients, and transactions are not recorded on the blockchain. This leads to massive breaches of security and unsafe storage of information, funds, and private keys. "Trading comes with risks, but traders should not face any other risks than those they are already willing to take."
Blockchain entrepreneurs understand this, and some of them are working hard on what many believe will be the future of trading: decentralized exchanges.
Decentralized exchanges or DEXes aim to tackle the problems that impedecentralized structures by building peer-to-peer marketplaces directly on the blockchain Ethereum mostly allowing traders to remain custodian of their funds. However, building a fully decentralized and efficient exchange remains today something of an utopia. Exchanges are centralized because it is the simplest way to proceed, and it is either too costly or technically complex to build fully decentralized platforms for now, at least.
Here is the list of exchanges. Let me know if I missed some of them.
Decentralized exchanges:
AirSwap.io
Decentralized exchange on Ethereum using the Swap protocol (Live on February 1st 2018!)
Altcoin.io
Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, powered by Atomic Swaps (Beta on testnet)
Barterdex (by Komodo Platform)
Open source decentralized network doing atomic swaps (in production)
Bancor Protocol
Smart contract based token exchange protocol (Live on the Ethereum MainNet)
Catalyst (by Enigma Project)
Investment platform for algorithmic/data-driven trading on crypto-assets without a custodian (in alpha; simulation available)
Etherdelta.com
The cryptocurrencies fully decentralized exchange market leader for ERC-20 tokens (Live)
Stellar Distributed Exchange (by Stellar)
StellarTerm is an open source distributed exchange for the Stellar network. (Live since 2015)
Peer to peer exchanges:
LocalBitcoins.com
- bitcoin to fiat exchange
LocalEthereum.com
- ether to fiat exchange
SimpleDex.org
- any cryptocurrency to fiat exchange(Live on March)
paxful.com
- bitcoin to fiat exchange
Hodl Hodl (Hodl Hodl)
P2P cryptocurrency exchange on the Bitcoin Testnet (Testnet)
Conclusion
99% of cryptocurrency transactions still go through centralized exchanges; this trend is expected to be reversed in the coming years. Switching to decentralized exchanges is necessary for cryptocurrency users to exploit their full potential, aligning with the decentralized nature of blockchain itself. Education is arriving, and most technological hurdles we face today will probably be overcome very soon.