In much of 2020 and 2021, as well as early 2022, Bitcoin and altcoins saw explosive action, mostly towards the upside, which had the world talking about crypto. Centralized exchange Coinbase even had one of the most talked about commercials in Super Bowl LVI.

Sadly for many crypto bulls, who believe in the future of the blockchain and derive financial gain from its success, this trend has recently reversed in the midst of rising interest rates and the fear of a US economy recession, among other things.

This downturn has placed the crypto market in another periodic bear market, meaning bulls like myself are forced to stay patient and accumulate (comment if you are in the same boat!). For these good habits to pay off, crypto holders will have to keep this up presumably until the next Bitcoin halving event, which will occur in mid 2024 at the earliest. While the bear market cycles are the best times for building good habits, they also expose those who strayed off the beaten path and got too greedy in the previous bull market. This time around, that means a series of devastating centralized exchange liquidations. 

Many crypto experts believe centralized exchanges go against the vision of Bitcoin's anonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto, and recent events exposing the ethics, or lack thereof, of centralized exchange owners/operators, have shown why. This is why true crypto professionals always choose to use decentralized exchanges over centralized exchanges whenever possible, as they are governed by a community of holders of a digital asset rather than a small oligarchy of founders and angel investors.

With this in mind, let's take a look at the top 6 decentralized crypto exchanges by trading volume right now (according to Coin Gecko):

Uniswap

Created in 2018 by Hayden Adams, the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) in operation today by trading volume is Uniswap protocol. Uniswap is built on the Ethereum blockchain, supports a whopping 800+ trading pairs, and boasts an astonishing 42% market share by volume. The protocol's namesake $UNI token is the sixteenth largest cryptocurrency in existence, sitting at a current $6.6 billion market capitalization (July 2022). If you want to exchange your crypto safely, Uniswap protocol is your best bet. (Not financial advice.)

PancakeSwap

PancakeSwap's claims to fame outside of exchanging tokens were liquidity pools and yield farming, two popular high-risk-high-reward ways to make crypto gains, and it is now the largest exchange on the Binance Smart Chain in 2022. While its security features have stood the test of time, and it is undoubtedly one of the best options when exchanging BSC tokens, keep in mind with some of the farming and liquidity locking opportunities on this protocol that offer eye-opening ROI numbers: if you think it seems too good to be true, you are probably right!

DFX

Coming in at the number 3 spot is the world's largest decentralized foreign exchange protocol - DFX Finance. This, the fact that the protocol is optimized for trading fiat-backed foreign stablecoins, is what makes DFX unique and special. Additionally, the protocol also allows users to lock up coins and earn a moderate yield which is safe and secure. 

DODO

Next we have DODO, a protocol which aims to provide the highest liquidity for traders wanting to exchange a wide variety of trading pairs across multiple chains. The DODO exchange protocol and its native $DODO token were officially launched in Q3 of 2020 by an anonymous Chinese development team, eventually climbing its way up the ranks to become one of the top DEXes in the entire crypto ecosystem.

Sushiswap

Also launched in 2020 was Sushiswap, a fork of Uniswap with some key provisions which yet another anonymous dev team (under pseudonym Chef Nomi) felt were needed to improve upon existing DEX infrastructure. As a result, Sushiswap is quite similar in nature to Uniswap, save a few additional features, most of which being "community oriented," such as governance. 

Curve Finance

Rounding off this list is Curve Finance, a DEX backed by the accommodation solely of liquidity pools of assets which behave similarly. The result is a protocol which derives much of its value from the simple fact that it has both very low fees and slippage. Curve offers rewards for participating in the network by giving CRV tokens to its liquidity providers. Curve was founded in January 2020 by Michael Egorov.

Conclusion

When exchanging or storing value with crypto assets to any serious extent, it is important to be able to swap between different tokens and even across different chains quickly, securely, and efficiently. One option is to use a centralized exchange - to pay and trust a third party a fee to hold and handle your funds, as well as maintain access to certain private information of yours. On the other hand, you could instead opt to utilize any of the decentralized protocols listed above, which instead employ trustless systems to reward participation in their network and charge their users minimal fees for transacting.

If you derived any value from this blog post, I would appreciate a tip, as they are free. Thank you and best of luck surviving this bear market.