Comparisons

A comparison with other venues where you can trade similar asset pairs.

DEXs

Examples: Mauve 1.0, Uniswap

• DEXs are capital inefficient. There has to be large amounts of capital “locked” up in LPs to do trades.

• The price you get is dependent on size. The bigger your trade size, the more price impact and “slippage” you will cause. Only more liquidity (which, as stated above, is inefficient) can improve this.

Permissionless Aggregators

Examples: https://1inch.io/

• These aggregators just rely on the accumulative liquidity of DEXs… and so have the same problems.

• They cannot source liquidity from other providers (CEXs, MM etc) due to compliance limitations.

Permissioned Aggregators

Examples: https://0x.org/products/swap

• These have the deepest liquidity as they source it from DEXs and off-chain sources (such as CEXs and Market Makers).

• They settle instantly - private sources of liquidity (such as MMs) can plug in… but must have the funds available to make a trade. This is capital inefficient and also a challenge from a risk perspective (MMs want to stay market neutral).

Offchain RFQ Systems

Examples: https://www.talos.com/

• Settlement happens entirely offchain. These are completely centralised systems.

Centralised Exchanges

Examples: Coinbase, Kraken

• Centralised exchanges that rely on their own liquidity

• They will be the counterparty to trades