Dash (@Dashpay): Crypto is facing a security and censorship reckoning, and DEXes, unfortunately, will bear the brunt of this.

Crypto is facing a security and censorship reckoning, and DEXes, unfortunately, will bear the brunt of this. Over the past several weeks we've witnessed a host of hacks, exploits, thefts, and more in the crypto world. In the past, these primarily were hacks on centralized exchanges. Sometimes the thief could simply withdraw the money and disappear, but other times their attempts to move the money could be thwarted by sounding the alarm across the rest of the exchanges and freezing or blocking the funds as they went through them. DEXes, if they truly are such, can't do this. By definition they allow anyone to use them, don't have transaction screening built into the protocol, and don't have centralized decision-makers who can arbitrarily filter, pause, or censor. The first problem is centrally frozen funds. If a stablecoin gets deposited on a DEX, and its issuer then decides to freeze it, the network faces an immediate solvency issue and essentially breaks. Operations can't resume until funds are unfrozen, but this may require repossession, identification, or other functions that a truly decentralized exchange just can't perform. The second, the elephant in the room, is network security. Many chains, particularly proof-of-work chains, can experience chain rollbacks. Two of the top ones, Litecoin and Monero, both experienced this in the past year. DEXes will have to require very high numbers of confirmations, but the difficult part about this is that it's impossible to know just how many to confirm. Most transactions are never truly safe and final, and a risk assessment must be made. We can't pretend that everything will always be perfect on our side. But Dash is hopefully a little less scary for a DEX to support than most of the rest of the space. Dash has no central issuer, so there is no risk of funds being frozen, even stolen ones. To some this may seem like a liability, but to a DEX it's a benefit. Additionally, Dash has deterministic finality within about one second, and chain reorg protection. This means that DEXes can rest easy knowing that transactions won't be reversed later. The space is evolving at a rapid pace, and DEXes may look very different just a few years from now depending on how they evolve to meet the latest pressures of the space. Either way, however, Dash will remain one of the more reliable and low-risk integrations.