Introducing DexIndex

Published in

Fluidity

3 min readJan 31, 2019

Today, we’re proud to announce DexIndex— An open source tool that searches Ethereum decentralized exchanges to find the best token prices. You can try it now at DexIndex.io. It’s free, and always will be.

Why DEX?

Ethereum offers a rich decentralized exchange or “DEX” ecosystem in 2019, and new projects are popping up all the time. The most popular DEX’s are carving out niches and meeting demand for many different use cases. Some examples include programmatic token conversion (Kyber), traditional order book replication (IDEX), and settling OTC style trades (AirSwap).

Get the best price, anytime

All these options fill different needs, but one common question remains unanswered: “Which DEX has the best price for X?” And, while DEX aggregation apps like Totle and Fetch exist, these are proprietary applications that ultimately aim to create a business. Where is the free, open API that crunches DEX price data in seconds for the broader community? Shouldn’t Ethereum developers be able to provide real-time prices in their applications?

A decentralized, egalitarian community like Ethereum’s deserves these tools. Enter the DexIndex.

An example search on DexIindex.io 40,000 DAI

Under the hood

The open source code is written with modularity in mind. Each DEX has its own JavaScript ES6 class, which acts as an API wrapper. You can compose these classes and fetch price data in just about any way you can think of. Here are a few examples of what’s possible today:

Host a web server that serves price data in response to HTTP requests
Use the service as a command line tool to fetch price data with a few keystrokes
Deploy Serverless functions on AWS lambda to scrape prices on an interval and seed a database
Export the ES6 classes and use them in your own projects

Getting involved

Today’s release supports AirSwap, Bancor, DDEX, IDEX, Kyber, and Radar Relay. We’d like to add support for ForkDelta, EthFinex, and Uniswap as soon as possible. If you’re interested in adding support for these exchanges or others, we welcome you to fork the code and start contributing. If you find a bug, please open a GitHub issue!

Thanks to Rob “Crypto Bobby” Paone, Steven D. McKie, Greg Rocco, Jake Brukhman, Spencer Noon, Eric Conner, Anthony Sassano, Eric Meltzer, and the entire AirSwap team for their valuable feedback on this initiative.

About AirSwap

AirSwap enables peer-to-peer trading on the Ethereum blockchain. Built on a decentralized protocol, traders can add or remove liquidity through a suite of trustless products that are easy to use and free. Our mission is to empower the world with frictionless trade.