DeFi Is The Only Way Forward
Amidst fear, there is hope for Crypto
2022 has been a crazy year for Crypto. The collapse of FTX, one of the biggest Crypto exchanges comes after the failure of 3AC and LUNA, industry giants.
No one could remotely imagine this happening. Yet here we are.
What Happened
Alameda, FTX’s sister company’s balance sheet was leaked and they were found to be heavily invested in FTT, FTX’s exchange token.
Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance announced that they were going to sell their stake in FTT. $580 Million worth of FTT was moved to a Binance exchange wallet soon after, leading to a big sell-off of FTT.
Many FTX users withdrew their funds (estimated at $5-6 Billion) and FTX declared bankruptcy after Binance passed up on a deal to acquire them.
Sounds confusing? In short, FTX used user funds for anything other than holding them in custody. This could work if they had earned a return from user funds, but had they made losses (which they did) everything would collapse.
For a full breakdown of the event, check out CoinDesk’s report on this event.
Moving Forward From This
Where does Crypto go from here? Ironically, this event may finally push users to trade on Decentralised Exchanges, store their tokens in their own wallets and provide liquidity on-chain.
Everything that Defi stood for since the beginning.
We are starting to see this transition, with our trade volumes tripling recently. However, for Defi to provide for most users over the long term, a lot of changes need to be made.
Here are some areas Tokenlon is working on to prepare for the next Defi summer.
Our Plans For The Future
There is a good reason why most Crypto users continue using Centralized Exchanges for their trading needs.
Because Defi still has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the following
- Trade liquidity to meet any orders with low slippage
- Easy-to-use platform interface
- On and off fiat ramps to onboard new users
Tokenlon has been working on improving these areas and more to onboard the next wave of Defi users.
Opening Access To The Tokenized World
Tokenlon’s goal is to become THE Decentralized Exchange and Payment Protocol for any and every token. To achieve this, we are working towards becoming a multi-chain DEX.
Soon users will be able to trade different tokens from different chains seamlessly. In addition to project tokens, we are researching building a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) aggregator. Even with the recent drop in NFT interest, many major brands are still exploring NFT integration. We believe there are multiple use cases for NFTs in the future.
Improving the user experience
Defi can only become mainstream if new users use and stay on Defi platforms. However, there is still a huge UX gap between Cefi and Defi.
Tokenlon is working on this front by focusing on two things- providing strong liquidity and ensuring user funds are safe.
We already provide one of the best quotes for ETH/USDT and ETH/USDC trade pairs in the Defi space. More is being done to make our pricing more competitive, by onboarding more market makers and implementing a “smart order routing” feature.
Make Tokenlon More Decentralized
Lastly, this saga has taught us that decentralization is more important than ever. Tokenlon’s ultimate goal is to become the decentralized protocol built by users and governed by users.
We will open up access for the community to build on Tokenlon. This means that anyone from the community can become a relayer, market maker and build new features on Tokenlon.
Tokenlon governance will be revamped as well, with the core team taking a smaller role in governance moving forward.
The Future Is Decentralized
Decentralization is no longer just something you can trade off against security and scalability. It is an essential part of any Crypto project.
Join us in becoming part of the future.
