I harboured some hopes of a huge exodus from all these big Polos, Bittrexs, Coinbases to fast, cheap, user-secured decentralised exchanges when I first learnt about them last year. The hype started in 2016 apparently, but after participating in once ICO (yes, I was a newbie too) and trying out trades faithfully on two DEXs for a time (Waves and Counterparty), I think I was way too optimistic.
Meeting plenty of newcomers who still want to choose centralised wallets, centralised exchanges, for the benefit of having someone to talk to and help them out as they learn to use bitcoin/crypto, I'm now thinking that these big exchanges still have a lot of years left in them. In fact, they'll probably continue to grow for as long as we remain in the phase of mainstream adoption.
Survival implies that they're facing extinction, but other than regulatory compliance and hacking risks, I have a feeling the big exchanges still responsible for the majority of volume are here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Asides from the benefit of having someone to talk to, I fell we are not just there yet with DEX. One thing is that newbies will still always find them a little bit hard to use as a result of the complexities which may even make them to lose money in the process unless they are smart enough to quickly get around how to make use of it. I still believe though, that we will get to see a lot of decentralized exchanges coming up and getting better, we are not just there yet.
Counterparty is a platform that extends Bitcoin in many ways including allowing users to create their own digital tokens and these can be exchanged peer-to-peer on a DEX. The platform launched in January 2014.