You can not eliminate the middle man in businesses, especially in this digital age, be it fiat or cryptocurrencies, because they have come to stay. Big exchanges like Binance, are cashing in on being the middle man in businesses, an unavoidable indirect business associates, in your face, waiting for you to go through them.
Certain cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are able to eliminate middleman technically, whereas in this case it is a user's need to adjust to business preferences, especially because cryptocurrencies must really pay attention to the level of trust of the second party.
As innovation develops in the crypto industry, the role of third parties can also be built into code which is usually called a smartcontract, although some of these sometimes have serious vulnerabilities that cause greater losses.
Theoretically, you can eliminate the middleman; however, in practice, it's not as easy as it sounds. Even P2P transactions require some sort of middleman; how are you going to pay for the bitcoin you're purchasing? Unless we're talking about a physical transaction with cash in hand, which isn't something that can be deemed particularly safe, I don't know about others, but this whole decentralized movement sounds too inconvenient to me, especially if you're new to cryptocurrencies and trying to make your first purchase. For us, who already hold some coins, the transition is a lot easier.
Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, exchanges are convenient and are used by a large percentage of the cryprocurrency community.
It serves its purposes. You may also choose decentralized exchanges but issues arise sometimes. On my end I am fine using eitherway but I do see the advantage of this ‘middleman’. It somehow gives me the assurance that I will get back with my funds even if someone would try to run with it ‘coz of procedures. Also, we have no other choice; cryptocurrencies are still not yet accepted to most of the countries therefore we would still be needing to convert our holdings to fiat everytime we would be buying something in local markets and to merchants. There are reputable ones we can trust if you’re that worries but since we are talking about centralized ones in this industry, expect higher transaction rates and delays in some instances due to block confirmations. Using it is like paying extra for convenience I guess but it will still never be advisable to store wealth on this platform ‘coz if anything would happen, your fund will be for sure at risk. Take FTX as an example for this one. This is not to generalize but it would be better if we would all be taking extra cautions of it to avoid worse situations. As long as adoption of this industry is still on roll, then we indeed have no other choice but to interact with third party platforms.