American entrepreneur and vocal crypto advocate John McAfee has launched a decentralized exchange (DEX) running on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain.
McAfee DEX is set to run in a beta release status as of Oct. 7, according to the new platform’s official website and McAfee’s personal Twitter feed.
“Centralized exchanges are our weak point”
On Oct. 5, McAfee’s tweet unveiled the new platform, stating that “it takes time for enough users to join to make it real, but if you play, and be patient,” the exchange can serve as “the door that frees us from Government's cornerstone of control: Fiat currencies. It can't be shut down.”
In an embedded video, McAfee argues that the cryptocurrency community faces the question of whether its aspirations are limited to merely expanding the possibilities for pure speculation — “all about money” — or are about an ideal, namely freedom.
After denouncing governments’ control over fiat currencies and the losses this presents to individual liberty, McAfee turned to the crypto space: “centralized exchanges are our weak point,” he said, pointing to China’s move to shutter 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 beta: the details
According to the details released so far, McAfee DEX reportedly will entail no Know Your Customer checks, block no jurisdictions and charge a single platform fee of 0.25% for takers. It will not charge maker fees and will also reportedly be open sourced.
Any ETH-based token (ERC-20 standard) can be added without a fee to the beta version, with more unspecified tokens to be supported in the future.
“Don’t expect miracles”
In his Oct. 5 video, McAfee pointed to the low number of traders currently using decentralized exchanges, considering that this makes them “useless.” For his DEX, McAfee urged users:
“Play with it, don’t expect miracles at first. Play with it until it becomes real.”
As Cointelegraph previously reported, non-custodial decentralized crypto exchanges enable users to trade peer-to-peer, using smart contracts to automate deal matching and asset liquidation in order to allow users’ funds to remain under their control.
As of January 2019, a survey of over 400 international crypto exchanges indicated that decentralized platforms accounted for just 19% of the global exchange ecosystem, and their trading volumes amounted to less than 1% of those on centralized exchanges.
This April, major centralized exchange Binance launched its own DEX on its native mainnet. Other major exchanges eyeing their own DEX include OKEx and Bithumb.