DEXs building their own chain

Crypto Analysis and Research
#1

Hi @canesin,

Can I get your technical opinion on DEX’s building their own chains? Serum, Switcheo, Vega, Orion, etc.

I came across this tweet from Vega’s founder: https://twitter.com/barnabee/status/1293533219791482884…

Feels like if every underlying blockchain used by Nash was performant (BTC, ETH aren’t atm), Nash would be much better off!

I don’t understand how they can pull it off without becoming custodial, but most DEX projects lately seem to be taking this direction. Aren’t you worried about it?

Thanks

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Nash and the competition
#2

And I would add the question for my better understanding;

  1. So if they are building their own chain, do they expect other projects to move to their chain like BinanceDEX?

  2. They plan to trade only projects that are on their chain - if not, why even bother with creating own chain?

  3. Is that like “marketing move like … look at us - we have own chain dex” ?

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#3

I think it is at the same time a comfortable and rewarding path.

There isn’t much innovation in using a fast BFT chain and doing a DEX in it. Serum, Switcheo, Vega, Orion are very inflationary projects as well (> 60% issuance in a year) so there is a incentive on participating by receiving the inflation as rewards - as crypto markets are fairly inefficient and somehow prices can be made insensitive to inflation.

I am not concerned in the long term - fundamentally a blockchain for a exchange is more of a database for funds bookkeeping and orderbook maintenance. If you work long enough on some problems like matching fairness you end up building things to be able to go back and forward in time for auditing and debugging - so everyone really trying to solve trading issues like that is building a blockchain-like data structure - a timestamped linked list of immutable events.

I don’t think using ready-made non fit-for-purpose systems for trading will be where winners are, however that is more of a technological point of view. So I truly believe we will be able to keep a strong edge on technology with our current offerings and future improvements.

My main concern and where the bizdev team has been putting a lot of energy is in bootstrapping markets, that is a huge and expensive effort that I would take some of this competition very serious. They could make-up for their lack of technology with their ability on creating markets.

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