Decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges have emerged as the preferential choice for high-volume traders who value the ability to maintain self-custody of their digital assets.
Last year’s shocking collapse of the FTX exchange, previously one of the world’s top three trading platforms, served as a powerful reminder of the risks of dealing with centralized exchanges. When trading on a CEX, the user is required to deposit their crypto with the exchange first, which means trusting that exchange. DEXs, on the other hand, allow traders to keep their funds in their own wallet.
The question for high-volume traders isn’t so much whether or not to use a DEX over a CEX, but rather, which DEX to use? One of the downsides of DEX platforms is that they don’t have the same level of liquidity as most CEX platforms. That’s a problem when trading large amounts of crypto in a single transaction, as it can mean a high degree of slippage, resulting in the trader paying a much higher price than they bargained for.
The good news is that not all DEXs are the same, and the platforms featured below can all be viable options for those trading large amounts of value.
StormGain DEX
Users may well be familiar with StormGain, which made its name as one of the most popular CEX platforms in Europe. Since last year, the company behind it also operates a second platform, StormGain DEX, which offers many of the same capabilities as its centralized exchange.
As soon as you enter StormGain DEX you’ll notice that it offers a good range of tokens, with literally hundreds of different cryptocurrencies available to trade. However, the biggest benefit of StormGain DEX is its unique ability to leverage the incredibly deep liquidity of its CEX cousin, in an approach known as “CeDeFi”. Although users trade peer-to-peer with smart contracts, StormGain DEX trades in an automated way using the liquidity available on its CEX platform to ensure that it can process even the largest trades instantly and with minimal slippage. Given that it also offers an impressive 500% leverage for traders, it’s clearly one of the smartest choices for decentralized trading.
As another benefit, traders can also benefit from StormGain’s cloud mining feature, earning free cryptocurrency rewards that grow as their trading volume increases. All of this, while maintaining self-custody of your funds.
Uniswap
No list of DEXs is complete without mentioning Uniswap, which is widely considered to be the world’s leading DEX platform for several reasons. Quite simply, Uniswap boasts the largest trading volume of any DEX by some distance from its rivals. Much of that is due to its multichain presence, with the platform available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Celo1inch, Optimism and Polygon, among other networks. It supports over a thousand different tokens, far more than any CEX.
With the highest trading volume, Uniswap’s liquidity pools are some of the deepest around, not only for popular token pairs but even some of the more obscure ones too. It also offers advanced features such as flash swaps, and integration with NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
1inch
This is a great option for decentralized trading because it isn’t a DEX at all, but rather what’s known as a DEX aggregator. 1inch taps into the liquidity of numerous top DEX platforms to offer traders the lowest possible price and keep slippage to an absolute minimum. Slippage is normally caused by low levels of trading activity, which means the asset in question may have to be bought at a higher price than the trader was hoping for, simply because no one wants to sell at the price they’re asking. By tapping into multiple DEXs, traders gain more room for maneuver.
At the time of writing, 1inch claims to offer liquidity from 188 providers across seven blockchains. To discover the best possible rates, it works by converging token prices from all supported DEXs. It can also split user’s transactions across several DEX platforms at once in the event of high volume trades.
PancakeSwap
Another iconic name in DEX trading is PancakeSwap, which is built on Binance’s BNB Chain. It’s one of the oldest DEX platforms around, having launched back in 2020. It uses fully automated and permissionless liquidity pools governed by smart contracts.
PancakeSwap’s automated market maker is one of the most comprehensive around, making it especially useful for high volume traders. It supports derivatives trading, as well as token swaps, yield farming and staking for hundreds of different assets.
One reason to use PancakeSwap is to avoid the sluggish transaction times and high gas fees that are prevalent on Ethereum. Because it uses BNB Chain and offers BEP-20 tokens only, trading on PancakeSwap is an incredibly swift and delightful experience for most traders.
The automated market maker (AMM) provides consumers with a variety of cutting-edge techniques to monetize their cryptocurrency holdings. This covers yield farming, staking, and token exchanges. Another advantage of the platform is that it often has exclusive access to many new tokens, including those that are yet to launch their initial dex offering.
SushiSwap
Built by fans of Uniswap, SushiSwap is a well known DEX that was forked from the original Uniswap codebase, altered to offer more user-friendly functions such as community governance with $SUSHI tokens and staking incentives.
SushiSwap is known for providing some of the best returns to liquidity providers of any DEX platform, which ensures that its liquidity pools are some of the deepest in the business. Its platform fees are some of the lowest around too, with users charged just 0.3% on any transaction. What’s more, those fees are reinvested into the platform via the community treasury, which uses governance voting to prioritize how the funds are spent.
Which One Should I Choose?
DEX platforms are in vogue in the crypto trading world as more users come to understand the benefits of self-custody. As such, most DEXs have evolved to offer comprehensive trading features that can rival even the best CEX platforms, making it difficult to judge which one is superior.
High-volume traders require two things – they need the reassurance that they remain in control of their funds. They also need deep enough liquidity to ensure that their trades will be processed without delay with slippage kept to the absolute minimum. The good news is that they’re spoiled for choices, as all of the above platforms are able to cater to these requirements.
