After having a small and hopeful jump in DEX volume early this year, we are now back to early 2021 levels. DEX adoption truly is NOT at its final stage yet.

After our historical 2022 year, one would think that many actually start to learn the most important lesson from that year, about not trusting centralized exchange. So logically thinking, after seeing the scams of FTX and Celsius, people should have been aware that CEXs are not what Crypto should be about. Well, sadly that may just have been a very brief effect:

​

DEX Volume per month and by project, chart from Dune

Here we can see a chart that shows the total DEX volume for the past years and that is divided by each big DEX project. We can clearly follow the chart even if we don‘t look at the years on the x-axis. A swift and exponential growth that started in late 2020 and followed up the the 2021 bull market where the DEX volume hit a massive milestone of over $200B per month, while pre-summer 2020 it was literally non-existent.

But now we are back to the reality, while the concerns about CEXs late last year had contributed to a bit of a DEX “re-awakening“ and briefly increased the volume back to over $100B in February of this year, this did not last long, as the sideways movements of the current market are pulling even more people out and many just seem to not learn the lessons from last year, we are now back to a roughly $25B monthly volume.

That is obviously a bit sad to see and shows that maybe DEXs have not really become that mainstream-friendly yet and are still plagued by too many hacks, so that people actually thing CEXs are somewhat “safer“.

But let‘s hope that we actually see some real DEX adoption in the next bull market, probably with simplification of DEXs, and Crypto becomes more decentralized, as it should have always been.