Controversial US entrepreneur and crypto enthusiast John McAfee has introduced a decentralized exchange (DEX) deployed and running on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. At present, the McAfee DEX platform is in its beta phase as per the official website of the platform and McAfee’s official tweet.
Two days before, McAfee introduced the new platform through a tweet and stated that “it takes time for enough users to join to make it real, but if you play, and be patient,” the exchange can function as “the door that frees us from Government’s cornerstone of control: Fiat currencies. It can’t be shut down.”
McAfee, through an embedded video, claims that the crypto fraternity stares the query of whether its ambitions are restricted to simply widening the capabilities for only speculation (“all about money”) or are about a conviction called freedom.
After condemning governments hold on fiat money and the disadvantages this creates to freedom of individual, McAfee started talking about crypto sector. McAfee said “centralized exchanges are our weak point,” underlining China’s decision to shut down domestic exchanges in September 2017.
McAfee continued:
“A distributed exchange can’t be shut down by anyone. Decentralized meaning that nobody controls it, distributed meaning that it is everywhere and therefore impossible to stop. We’ve had privacy coins, that’s the other part of this equation, because privacy coins with decentralized, distributed exchanges is the goose that lays the golden egg for us. We don’t use it though.”
McAfee DEX will not perform KYC (Know Your Customer), will not prevent people from any jurisdictions and impose a single platform charge of 0.25% for takers. There will be no maker fees and will be supposedly open sourced.
As of now, any ETH-based token that satisfies ERC-20 standard can be added to the beta version of the platform, with several unidentified tokens to be backed in the future. In his video, McAfee highlighted the small number of traders who are presently using decentralized exchanges, making the whole experiment “useless.” McAfee invited crypto traders to make use of the platform.
“Play with it, don’t expect miracles at first. Play with it until it becomes real.”
Non-custodial decentralized crypto exchanges permit users to buy/sell on a peer-to-peer basis, utilizing smart contracts to mechanize trade matching and asset selling out so as to permit users funds to stay under their authority.
As of January 2019, a study of more than 400 global cryptocurrency exchanges showed that decentralized platforms represented for only 19% of the worldwide exchange ecosystem and their trading volumes accounted to only 1% of those on centralized trading facilities.
Notably, in April 2019, Binance introduced its own DEX on its native mainnet. Other top cryptocurrency exchanges, which are planning to launch their own DEX are OKEx and Bithumb.
