What is a DEX?

A decentralised exchange (better known as a DEX) is a person to person marketplace where buying and selling of crypto occur directly between crypto traders. DEXes fulfil one of crypto’s core possibilities: making financial transactions that aren’t maintained or monitored or handled by banks, brokers, payment processors, or any other kind of intermediary or middleman.

The most popular DEXs — like Uniswap and Sushiswap — utilise the Ethereum blockchain and are part of the growing suite of decentralized finance (DeFi) tools, which make a huge range of financial services available directly from a compatible crypto wallet. DEXs are booming — in the first quarter of 2021, $217 billion in transactions flowed through decentralized exchanges. As of April 2021, there were more than two million DeFi traders, a ten-fold increase from May 2020.