Initially, crypto users can trade their assets through an only centralized exchange, where there were many hiccups like privacy concerns, strict KYC norms, etc. But, with the introduction of Defi (Decentralized Finance) exchanges, there is no need for these concerns.
There is no centralized authority for the Top 10 Defi exchanges, instead, the major decisions of the exchange are taken through the user’s consensus mechanism. There is also no need for strict KYC and because of these benefits, these types of exchanges got highly popular among crypto users.
So, let us see in this article the top 10 Defi exchanges according to their user benefits!
Uniswap has been one of the longest players in this DeFi space and with each of its upgrades Uniswap has kept on getting better and better. With public ownership and permissionless automated designs the uniswap’s protocol is one of the best public-owned DeFi protocols.
The latest upgrade of Uniswap is Version 3 and its main focus has been to improve the automated market-making mechanism. With over $700 billion in trading volume and with over 4000 community delegates, Uniswap exchange has far surpassed many of the centralized crypto exchanges. Uniswap has now built an ecosystem of multiple applications on its protocol. There are now over 300 applications that support uniswap’s integration.
Uniswap is automated to a great extent, the trades are matched according to mathematical formulas. Users can earn crypto by lending their crypto holdings to liquidity pools, in version 3 the lending rates range from 0.05% to 0.3% according to the liquidity pool.
Uniswap has also built a supportive community over the years, there is now strong community support in different online forums like reddit, Discord..etc. Also, uniswap protocol is publicly owned and through on-chain governance process the UNI holders can govern the protocol.
There are now close to 17,000 members in Uniswap snapshot, where users can vote on uniswap’s proposals. The power of the vote is proportional to the amount of UNI tokens hold by the user. The UNI token is currently trading at $17.77 and uniswap’s market cap has reached over $11 billion.
Uniswap runs on the Ethereum blockchain, so users have to pay Ethereum gas fees while completing a swap transaction. But, as we know Ethereum blockchain has become a lot more congested and the gas fee also has become higher and higher over the years. So, sometimes fees don’t make sense for small amount in Uniswap transactions.
Pancakeswap gives you all the necessary feature that is required for efficient trading, almost any type of asset can be traded in Pancakeswap – it runs on Binance smart chain and users can trade instantly without any registration process. Users can use the CAKE tokens released by Pancakeswap, users can buy, win, and also farm CAKE tokens from the platform.
Pancakeswap is pretty much straightforward and highly user-friendly, anyone can start trading immediately by connecting their crypto wallet. The exchange supports all major wallets and some of the most common wallets used with pancakeswap are SafePal, MathWallet, MetaMask and Trust Wallet. There are also many other wallets which can be conveniently used with pancakeswap.
Crypto currencies can be swapped in the exchange dashboard, pancakeswap supports major crypto currencies like ETH, TUSD, BNB, and many more coins. Users can also stake their coins in farms or pools provided by pancakeswap to earn some crypto. Users can choose the crypto pair based on the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) and Liquidity.
For example, at the time of writing this article, the pair CAKE-BNB has an APR of 41.39% and liquidity of over $310 million. The earnings provided by these farms is far greater than traditional financial institutions.
In addition to staking coins, users can also participate in trading competitions and lottery to win some crypto coins. The trading competition is done between teams, so users can choose their teams and participate in these competitions. The team with the highest trading volume wins the prize.
There is also a separate dashboard for NFT collections, users can choose their preferred collection based on their interest and can start trading instantly.
The trading fee at pancakeswap is 0.25%, to preserve liquidity 0.17% of this fee is added back to the liquidity pool.
If you are looking for a DeFi exchange that looks and feels a lot more similar to traditional exchange then you can go with dYdX exchange. Users can start trading with just $10 investment and can start trading with perpetual contracts. With over $500 million in market cap, dYdX is one of the leading exchanges in DeFi space. Almost all popular crypto currencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Cardano and many more can be traded in this exchange.
dYdX has introduced its latest layer 2 update, with layer 2 users get low fees and also users don’t have to pay any gas costs to the miners. Compared to many other DeFi exchanges trades and withdrawals can be done relatively quick. The exchange has crossed over billion dollars in trading volume and there is also a good level of security and privacy with layer 2 upgrade. This is the reason why there are over 15,000 traders trading their assets in dYdX platform.
Users can earn rewards by staking their coins on the liquidity pools and safety pools. User can also earn rewards by trading high volume on the dYdX exchange.
dYdX has a separate dashboard for governance and users can vote on the proposals of the exchange. If users face any issues using the exchange, they can solve their issues by browsing the dYdX forums, there is a also a supportive user community for dYdX exchange in social media platforms.
The fees at dydx varies according to the users trading volume. Here the exchange implements the maker-taker model. Generally if the transaction value is within $1 million, the maker fee is 0.05% and taker fee is 0.1%.
1inch is one of the most straightforward DeFi exchanges, with limited set of popular tokens like ETH, USDC and USDT. There are two different modes in 1inch, both simple mode and classic mode. Users who want to trade instantly can use the simple mode and for much more liquidity and low slippage classic mode can be used. The exchange is built on Ethereum network, and it even has its own token called 1inch exchange.
1inch has one of the most comprehensive governance structures, like all other popular DeFi exchanges 1inch also uses DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to govern the platform. Users can use the pools and farming widgets to earn crypto by staking their coins in their preferred pair.
There is also a separate dashboard for analytics where users can check the stats for liquidity, earnings and volume. 1inch also has a very active forum with engaging community members, where users can find solutions to their issues.
1inch does not charge any fees for its platform like deposit fees, withdrawal fees and other general fees. 1inch uses many other DeFi exchanges to produce liquidity to their platform, these liquidity providers charge a certain amount of fees for the liquidity they provide. So, users have to pay this amount as a fee, other than there are no other major fees on the platform.
1inch has also provided a feature called infinity lock with which we can avoid this liquidity provider’s fees. Through infinity lock users can give permission to 1inch to spend their tokens, so they don’t have to pay any gas fee to unlock the tokens again and again.
Kine, like dYdX provides a platform for its users like a traditional exchange. Kine guarantees zero slippage and users can perform their trades at live prices. Also, Kine is now available in Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Avalanche. The platform is built on the Ethereum network and accepts almost all major cryptocurrencies to trade. Users can connect their Metamask wallet and can start trading immediately.
Kine has a separate domain for staking called kine.finance, where users can stake their coins and can earn some crypto coins. At the time of writing this article users can skate up to 6 cryptocurrencies, they are USDC, Wrapped BTC, Ether, USDT, xKINE, and WOO.
There is also a cross-margin facility through which any crypto pair can be traded within a short span of time. The exchange also provides 100x leverage, through which the users can make trades of up to 100 times of the value of their assets. For example, if a user’s asset value is $1, he/she can make trades of worth $100.
This high leverage helps in improving the liquidity of the exchange and also helps in reducing the spread. Users can check their account balance by using the balance tab, once deposited it takes at least 12 block confirmations to appear in your account dashboard.
Currently, the KINE token price is $1.04 and the 24-hour trading volume is close to $2 million.
There is no gas fee charged by Kine Exchange for trading.
Sushiswap is one of those first DeFi exchanges that started naming the exchanges with names of food. Sushiswap is an all-in-one decentralized exchange where users can swap, earn, stack, borrow and lend crypto coins.
According to its website, the exchange provides over $3 billion in liquidity, which is a massive amount of liquidity when compared to traditional crypto exchanges. There are over 2000 pairs to trade in Sushiswap. One of the major features of Sushiswap is Sushibar, users can stake their tokens for sushibar. In return, the users get governance rights and 0.05% of the swap fees proportional to tokens staked.
The exchange supports over 20 wallets and can support over 14 major blockchain networks. The swap dashboard is highly user-friendly and straightforward. Users can straight away connect their crypto wallets and can start swapping the tokens.
There is also a feature called bento box, through which the users can use their dapps gas efficiently. Users can lend and borrow crypto tokens using Sushi’s Kashi dashboard. There are different farms available for users to earn tokens by participating in their preferred pools.
Sushiswap is a long-term player in the defi space and has become popular year on year. There are now over 150,000 sushi holders, this has pegged the $SUSHI price to close to $9 at the time of writing this article.
Because of this high level of popularity, there are also thousands of users supporting the community by sharing their knowledge about the exchange. At Discord there are over 61,000 Sushi members and if a beginner user faces any issues they can straight away solve their issues with the help of the discord group.
Sushiswap charges 0.25% as a trading fee and out of this fee 0.05% is paid back to the SUSHI token holders. This acts as an incentive to hold SUSHI tokens, which in turn helps in improving the liquidity of the platform.
Honeyswap built on xDai chain is another popular decentralized exchange with millions of users worldwide – Honeyswap can used only by connecting a crypto wallet and honeyswap supports only a limited number of wallets. The most popular wallet that can be used to access is Metamask, the exchange is simple to use and supports xDai and polygon network.
Users can earn tokens by providing liquidity to the pools, liquidity providers would be able to earn at least 0.25% in swap fees. The governance of the exchange is separately handled by a community platform called 1hive.
To stay true to being de-centralized honeyswap is controlled by DAO. The DAO is responsible for distributing the Honey tokens and users who hold these honey tokens can take part in the voting process of the proposals. This voting process is called conviction voting where users can vote on how they want to shape the future of the Honey network.
Any network that is controlled by multiple users can face disputes, 1hive solves these disputes by having a separate feature called celeste. Here the users can adjudicate disputes and can help in solving a dispute by bringing in a solution.
There is also a separate feature called charts where users can analyze the protocols used by the honeyswap, that is polygon and xDai. Users would be able to see all the necessary information like liquidity, volume, trading tokens ..etc about the selected protocol. Users would also be able to view the top accounts that are providing the liquidity for these protocols.
The exchange charges its users 0.25% in trading fees.
If you are looking for an easy-to-use colorful platform to trade your crypto assets then you can give Traderjoe a try. The best positive point of trader joe is its user-friendly design. The design looks very simple and easy to use. There are also multiple pools to choose from based on liquidity, volume, fees and APR.
Also, if a user has large amount of token he/she can create a new pool by being the first liquidity provider. By connecting the wallet and choosing the right pair we can start staking tokens and can earn crypto. For more rewards users can also go with double reward farms, here the user gets both JOE toke and bonus token as rewards.
For users who want to go with low-risk investments can go with the lending option, here the user gets tokens as rewards for lending their crypto tokens. There is also an option to switch the dashboard from light mode to dark mode with just a single click.
TraderJoe exchange has its own token called the JOE token and the token has a market cap of close to $300 million. At the time of writing this article the value of the JOE token is $1.99. JOE tokens are necessary to vote on the proposals that are submitted in Traderjoe’s forum. The value of the JOE vote depends on the type of pair. The JOE tokens from the JOE-AVAX pool has a value of 2JOEVOTE, whereas JOE tokens from xJOE have a value of 1JOEVOTE.
TraderJoe charges a 0.3% fee for every transaction and in this 0.3% commission, 0.25% goes back into the traded pair to increase the liquidity.
ApolloX DEX looks and feels a lot more like traditional crypto exchange, like many other popular DeFi exchanges we can straight away start trading by connecting our wallet, here at ApolloX there is no need for users to sign up. There is also no KYC requirement, the exchange gives importance to both privacy and security.
Instead of using a wallet, here users can straight away deposit their currencies in the given deposit address. ApolloX supports both Binance Network and as well as the Ethereum network.
There is both isolated margin and cross margin facility available for user to trade crypto and the liquidity is also high because of high leverage. The exchange offers up to 100x leverage. This high level of liquidity makes sure that there is reduced level of slippage. The exchange has its own token called APX, currently the token is trading for $0.79. APX tokens are also rewarded for users who trade with high volume.
Almost all popular crypto currencies can be traded in this exchange. The exchange offers perpetual future contracts for trading. Users who want to swap instantly can use the instant exchange feature, where users can swap a crypto coin with another coin instantly.
The exchange also offers lottery draw, through which users can win crypto coins. Apollox DEX also made its api public in github, so users can use this api in a transparent manner to make their trades.
Fees in ApolloX DEX is somewhat similar to centralized exchanges. The fee model is maker-taker model, the fee is 0.02% for makers and 0.07% for takers. So, in general makers fees is less for providing the liquidity and takers are charged for using the liquidity.
Biswap is the first decentralized exchange to support Binance smart chain network. Here the users can swap their tokens that are based on BEP-20 network. Compared to many other decentralized exchanges, Biswap offers many different features and users can earn crypto through many ways.
Here also users can earn tokens by providing liquidity to the platform and there are over 50 farm pools in Biswap for users to stake their coins. Users can choose their preferred coin pair for staking. Biswap pools offer attractive interest rates for people who lock their coins in return for BSW token – the BSW token launched by Biswap is currently trading at the rate of $1.06.
Recently Biswap has also launched a new play to earn game called squid-nft through players can earn crypto rewards according to their level of engagement. Not only crypto assets, users can also stake their NFT assets to earn tokens as rewards. There is also lottery feature and different number of competitions through which the users can increase their chances of winning crypto tokens.
Through the analytics dashboard users can understand the current level of liquidity in the Biswap protocol and also about the volume traded in the exchange. Users can also find the rankings of the pools and crypto pairs with highest level of transactions. Biswap has also got audited by CERTIK, which is one of the most reputed security firms. This shows that the exchange takes its user’s security and privacy seriously.
Like all other popular DeFi exchanges the governance is taken care by community voting. The voting power is proportional to the amount of BSW tokens owned by the user.
The exchange’s market cap is over $800 million and the trading fee is also lowest in the industry, it is 0.1%.
With each passing day we can see new innovations in the crypto space and from the above list, we can see the benefits offered by these Defi exchanges. The introduction of Defi exchanges has completely changed the playing field, as these types of exchanges give more importance to privacy and security.
These exchanges made it possible for normal users to make decisions by voting on the proposals. It has given back the power to the general users who trade and hold crypto.
Read all news about DeFi here!
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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