Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued on Twitter that a decentralized exchange could bridge the top two cryptocurrencies in the space, Bitcoin and Ethereum, in a trustless way.
We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It's embarrassing that we still can't easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 24, 2020
Per the Ethereum co-founder, the community should put resourced toward a “proper” decentralized exchange that would allow users to trade Ethereum for Bitcoin and vice-versa. The exchange, he said, should be like Uniswap, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange on the Ethereum blockchain that doesn’t have order books, but instead sees users trade against its reserves.
These reserves are pooled between a “decentralized network of liquidity providers who collect fees on every trade,” and the prices on each trade are automatically created based on a specific formula.
Decentralized exchanges have notably failed to gain traction so far, struggling to gain market share while competing against centralized trading platforms. According to CryptoCompare, as of December 2019 decentralized exchanges captured only 0.01% of the cryptocurrency space’s total trading volume.
In a follow-up tweet, Buterin added that decentralized exchanged bridging the Ethereum ecosystem with those of other cryptocurrencies should also be built. The co-founder of Eth noted he discussed the idea with Zooko Wilcox, CEO of the Electric Coin Company, which was behind the creation of the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Zcash.
It’s worth noting that existing decentralized exchanges are geared towards one specific blockchain. Most are on the Ethereum blockchain, although there are decentralized exchanges for TRON’s TRCtokens and for Binance’s BEP tokens, for example.
Featured image via Unsplash.
