Does anyone have experience trading on DEMEX?
I see that it is supposedly decentralized and supported by “Switcheo tradehub” so I think it can be trusted?
Is it ERC-20 NEX that is traded?
For the trader friends, maybe we should provide some liquidity there?
I’ve dabbled with Demex. Here’s my experience trying to buy NEX:
Connecting your assets
There are three ways to use Demex. You can connect with Ledger Live, with your Metamask wallet, or you can create a TradeHub account.
I created a TradeHub account because I don’t use Metamask that much, and I don’t use hardware. When you create a TradeHub account, you’re given a .JSON file to download. This file is used as your ‘username’ the next time you login to Demex, along with a password you set during account creation.
Deposit methods
I wanted to purchase ERC20 NEX (Demex doesn’t have NEP5 NEX yet), so my first step was depositing ETH or USDC. There are four ways to deposit ETH/ERC20s on Demex:
Switcheo Tradehub – transferring in funds from another Tradehub account. The Tradehub ecosystem’s native token is SWTH, it’s used to power most transfers on their blockchain. As you can see, the network fee to transfer in ETH is 1 SWTH.
Ethereum (via Token Transfer) – this method involves creating a wallet on the Tradehub blockchain (built on Cosmos SDK). There is a one-time wallet creation fee with this method, and it can be expensive depending on gwei. At time of writing this, the fee is $10.75. A few months ago when gwei was nutty, this fee was above $500.
Picture below is deposit summary for ETH on Demex as of June 20th, 2021.
Ethereum (via Metamask) – direct deposit of ERC20 funds from a Metamask wallet. There is no wallet creation fee.
Ethereum (via Ledger) – same as above, but with Ledger. No wallet creation fees involved.
Depositing funds
To be honest, the one-time fee being $10 right now is really not that bad. $500 was a little bit over budget for me at the time so I had to get creative. I used a fiat ramp service to purchase BUSD (BEP20), and entered my Demex BSC address as the ramp destination. Funds arrived on Demex totally fine. There is no wallet creation fee for BSC deposits, but I felt dirty using their network. The things we do for NEX… 
Trading
The UI is fine, nothing complicated or offensive about the platform.
Volume and liquidity is poor. Very poor. The highest volume pair right now is $50k/24hr (SWTH/USDC). NEX/USDC is around $2k/24hr.
Just based on that I don’t know if I’d recommend Demex, unless we as a community made a giant push to adopt it as our primary platform for NEX. Based on what I’ve seen in Telegram though, it seems like everyone associates Demex with absurd wallet creation fees (not the case anymore).
Withdrawing
There’s a TradeHub network fee and an Ethereum network fee when withdrawing ERC20s. The TradeHub network fee is 1 SWTH, and the Ethereum fee scales with gwei and is taken from the token you’re withdrawing. If you’re withdrawing NEX, you’re paying the ETH network fee in NEX.
As for SWTH, I used a faucet to get 2 SWTH for free. This covered everything I needed to do, but if I continued using Demex I’d likely buy a small bag of it.
When I was testing the platform several months ago, I only bought $100 of NEX. When I went to withdraw it, the fee to do so was about $65 worth of NEX.
This seemed like an unfortunate reality of the Demex platform, and how bad gwei was at the time. There was nothing I could do about it, so I opted to sell NEX back into BUSD, withdraw that to Binance, buy NEO, and then use that to buy NEP5 NEX on Switcheo.
Final thoughts
Demex isn’t a bad platform, it’s just not the most user-friendly and some of its functionalities were real UX-breakers for me. That being said, if its volume was higher and Ethereum network fees stayed low, it would be a decent way to get more NEX.
Thanks for the thorough explanation of your experience.