⚡Foreword
Last updated
Last updated
Numerous crypto projects and exchanges claim to be decentralized and advertise themselves as your key to financial independence. While taking a deep look into the core of said DEXs, we often find crippling Ponzi schemes in disguise.
Cryptocurrencies were invented by Satoshi with the clear goal in mind to achieve decentralized finance. Still, the crypto space is suffering under centralized exchanges who lie to their customers, misuse their funds and put the name of cryptocurrencies to shame. Since BTCs all-time-high, the vast majority of catastrophes in crypto were caused by overly centralized ecosystems.
Decentralized exchanges would be the perfect alternative to those CEXs. The most popular DEXs are mostly forks of Uniswap V2. By pairing a coin with a token into a liquidity pool, trading is made possible without any middlemen. Owners of said Uniswap forks redirect parts of the transaction fees into their treasuries. The teams often have full control over said funds. Some of the most popular DEXs are even owned and controlled by big centralized exchanges or token projects with shady backgrounds.
Countless DeFi projects launch every day, some after large presales. Those presales target high raises to fund a big liquidity pool, as well as development expenses and marketing costs. While the pre-launch-marketing is spectacular, most token projects fail to deliver after their respective launches. After a token is then declared discontinued, large sums of money remain in the liquidity pools until the liquidity lock expires. This takes huge sums of coins out of circulation and away from the overall volume in meriting projects with interesting utilities and ideas. We will call this phenomenon "dead liquidity".
Total value locked in liquidity pools as of March 7th, 2023: