All crypto traders will agree that one major drawback to the entire ecosystem at the moment is centralized exchanges. Companies such as Coinbase rake in billions of dollars through inflated fees and commissions on what should theoretically be a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Crypto exchange Bitfinex is planning to alleviate this problem with a decentralized exchange of its own.
According to Coinmarketcap, Bitfinex is the world’s fifth largest exchange with just under a billion dollars traded in the past 24 hours. In an announcement yesterday, the company introduced the first high-performance decentralized exchange to be built on EOS.IO technology.
On-chain Exchange
The company has said that its new product, EOSfinex, will combine the speed and scalability of EOS with its own leading industry expertise. The result will be an on-chain exchange providing fast, transparent, and trustless transfers of digital currencies. EOS.IO, with the ability to handle thousands of transfers per second, was a good fit with the goals of Bitfinex to continue pushing the boundaries of the high volume trading platform.
Company CEO, J.L. van der Velde, stated;
We are excited to leverage EOS.io to further advance the field of high performance and trustless on-chain exchange. Block.one continues to display an unwavering dedication to improving blockchain scalability through the EOS.IO platform and it is our hope that this collaboration will allow significant advancement for all decentralised exchange.
He went on to note:
Our experience indicates that these advancements represent fundamentally transformative capabilities for the blockchain industry, and Bitfinex remains dedicated to leveraging the latest innovations to continue offering the world’s leading trading experience.
EOS over Ethereum
EOS is a blockchain protocol which enables horizontal scaling of decentralized applications (dApps). This effectively allows developers to create high performance distributed applications that do not operate on the same chain. Ethereum developers are working on a similar technology called sharding which will facilitate the same thing when the update is rolled out.
The EOS token is currently ninth in the market capacity charts, trading at the time of writing around $9. It has risen steadily over the past week by 50% but is still down from its all-time high of $18 on January 11. The total market cap is just under $6 billion and it is traded predominantly on South Korean exchange Bithumb which has 40% of the total. Around $348 million has been traded in the past 24 hours and the news of the partnership is likely to boost these figures for EOS.
Would you use a decentralized exchange over a centralized one? Add your thoughts below.
Images courtesy of Bitfinex, EOSfinex, Shutterstock