Three Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) to Watch Once the Crypto Market Rebounds

Cryptocurrencies have become some of the most traded financial instruments of our time, with both retail and institutional investors rushing to get a piece of the pie. While it is undeniable that this market has enjoyed significant success, one cannot ignore the underlying challenges when it comes to trading crypto products. As it stands, centralized crypto exchanges like Binance, FTX and Coinbase dominate the trading volumes, but are they really reliable?

If history is anything to go by, there have been several instances where centralized exchanges failed to protect their clients' funds. Most notably, the $460 million Mt Gox hack back in 2014 affected over half of crypto market participants at the time. Today, we are facing a bigger challenge; according to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the ongoing bear market has affected a number of third tier exchanges, making them insolvent.

"some third-tier exchanges that are already secretly insolvent," recently noted the crypto billionaire.

Could this be the opportunity that Decentralized Exchange (DEX) innovators have been waiting for? Well, it is slowly becoming evident that crypto investors are better off trading through DEXs and storing their funds in non-custodial wallets. That said, the market is currently saturated with DEXs offering crypto trading services, amongst other products. In the next section of this article, we will highlight three leading DEXs that are significantly changing the DeFi trading landscape.

1.   SOMA.finance

SOMA.finance is a pioneer multi-asset DEX to launch SEC and FINRA compliant crypto products. This Layer-1 DEX has partnered with U.S licensed broker Tritaurian Capital to enable the trading of regulated crypto assets, tokenized equities, STOs, ETFs and NFTs. Unlike most of the existing DEXs, SOMA.finance follows the proper KYC/AML guidelines, meaning that both retail and institutional investors can trade without worrying about regulatory crackdowns.

More importantly, the SOMA.finance DEX provides a compliant way for global companies to raise funds by issuing tokenized securities in the decentralized market. Ideally, firms that leverage SOMA.finance to raise funding will not only be able to access local capital but international investors as well. On the other hand, investors have an opportunity to acquire investments that are normally inaccessible in centralized market structures.

It is also noteworthy that the public equities traded on SOMA.finance are stored in the Tritaurian Capital omnibus account and can be lent out to earn a passive interest. Investors who wish to liquidate their assets can do so through the SOMA.finance ecosystem in the form of tokenized equities on the blockchain. As for its tokenomics, SOMA.finance is governed through a native token dubbed $SOMA, which also doubles down as the staking reward token.

2.   OraiDEX

Built on the Oraichain ecosystem, the OraiDEX is a AI-powered crypto trading platform, with additional features such as token bridging, IBC integration and an NFT bridge. DeFi users looking for a better alternative to centralized exchanges can leverage this CosmWasm smart contract-based DEX to perform several functions, including the transfer of native token data from Ethereum, BSC and other blockchains to Oraichain, and back.

Besides swapping several Layer-1 native tokens, the OraiDEX also features liquidity pools where users can allocate Orai token pairs to earn the ORAIX token as a bonus. Currently, there are some pools which are offering up to 150% APR, a lucrative return given the prevailing market conditions. That said, OraiDEX's multi-chain interoperability stands out the most; with this DEX, DeFi natives have access to more liquidity at optimal speeds.

Notably, the OraiDEX is just one of the innovative products by Oraichain. This AI-powered blockchain and smart contract ecosystem features other innovations, including an AI marketplace, labeling hub, request hub, publisher hud and a DApp hosting platform.

"Beyond data oracles, Oraichain aims to become the first AI Layer 1 in the Blockchain sphere with a complete AI ecosystem, serving as a foundational layer for the creation of a new generation of smart contracts and Dapps." reads an introductory medium blog post.

3.   Blueshift

The Blueshift DEX is not your average AMM-style crypto trading platform; unlike its counterparts, Blueshift features a new-generation crypto asset management protocol based on liquidity portfolios. Simply put, Blueshift leverages portfolios to hold liquidity instead of the normal DeFi trading pairs which are typically exposed to impermanent loss and high price slippage.

With Blueshift's liquidity portfolio AMM algorithm, DeFi users can acquire a share of the listed tokens instead of going through the lengthy process of providing a liquidity pair. Furthermore, the tokens featured in the liquidity portfolio are managed by the protocol's users, meaning that LPs can easily enter into a swapping agreement; this ultimately rebalances the ownership of the portfolio over time.

More interestingly, Blueshift creates a virtual trading pair to enable the trading of listed tokens, which is actually much cheaper and less risky for prospective LPs. So far, this burgeoning DEX has attracted over $23 million in its staking pools, not to mention a 764% increase in its native token price to hit an all-time high of $2.16 back in May.

Conclusion

Despite the current macro uncertainty, the crypto ecosystem is set for more growth once the market conditions stabilize. This means that exchanges will likely witness a surge in clients as was the case in November at the height of the bull market. However, this time things might play out a little bit differently; DEXs stand a better chance of taking the lion share of the market, given that they have proven to be resilient through bear market and the dwindling investor sentiment towards centralized crypto service providers.