Analysis of Development Trends in the DEX Track

The DEX track has recently shown five major development trends:

1. Market share is highly concentrated. In terms of locked-up volume and trading volume, a few leading DEXs account for the vast majority of the market share. The total locked-up volume of the top 5 DEXs reaches $16.36 billion, far exceeding other DEXs. In terms of trading volume, only 5 DEXs have a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $100 million.

2. The proportion of cross-chain and cross-layer trading protocols is on the rise. Among the top 60 DEXs, the number of protocols deployed for cross-chain and cross-layer transactions has reached 16, accounting for about a quarter. This reflects the mainstream trend in the development of DeFi.

3. AMM+NFT becomes a new direction. One type is NFT trading platforms based on the AMM mechanism, such as sudoswap; the other type adds NFT trading to AMM, like Uniswap's attempts. This combination is expected to enhance NFT liquidity.

4. Major public chains have all entered the leading tier of DEXs. Besides Ethereum, native DEXs on new public chains like BNB Chain, Cronos, and Arbitrum are also performing well. Applications chains in the Cosmos ecosystem are worth paying attention to.

5. The potential of stablecoin and derivatives trading platforms is becoming evident. In the context of a sluggish market, these two types of platforms are expected to attract more demand. Representative projects include Curve and dYdX.

The future directions worth paying attention to in DEX development include: established Ethereum DEXs, cross-chain DEXs, stablecoin trading protocols, Cosmos ecosystem DEXs, and new public chain DEXs. In the long run, DEXs remain an important pillar of DeFi, but the public chain landscape may present a scenario of one super strong and multiple strong players. The development of DEXs on L2 networks also needs to be a key focus.