Due to the lawsuit filed by the US SEC against the founder of DESO (July 31), accusing him of fraud and unregistered securities, the listed company Coinbase was forced to delist DESO on November 8.
This has instead boosted the development of the decentralized DEX Openfund, which rose by more than 20% on the day. Openfund is the native DEX platform of DESO, and in the future will support a comprehensive decentralized DeSo DEX platform for BTC, ETH, SUI, SOL and other ecosystem Tokens, with the advantages of being as fast and with super low fees as Binance. With the rise of the DESO ecosystem, Openfund will be one of the largest DEX platforms in the DESO ecosystem.
Due to this Coinbase news, DESO founder Nader has released updates on Openfund, HeroSwap and the DeSo DEX, which is the underlying on-chain infrastructure that supports both.
Looking ahead, Openfund and HeroSwap will become the go-to destinations for MM DESO. If anyone asks you where to trade DESO, please send it to HeroSwap (for swaps) or Openfund (for limit orders and a full order book experience). We are doubling down on these two products, and we will make them an even better experience than anything a CEX can provide. Starting today, we are increasing the automated market maker liquidity available in the DESO market to +/-2% spreads at $50. This is not only >6x the liquidity we had before, but more than Coinbase *has ever had. In fact, this means that if you go to Openfund today, you will be able to buy and sell more DESO at lower slippage than on any CEX DESO has ever been listed on (give it a try!). And all of this without any privacy-invading onboarding process, as all trades are fully self-custodial, thanks to the underlying DeSo DEX infrastructure that is fully decentralized and on-chain.
But this is just the beginning. We will also be increasing the liquidity in BTC, ETH, SOL and OPENFUND markets before the launch of Focus. This will make trading on Openfund competitive with any CEX for these currency pairs, with the added benefit of being fully self-custodial (not to mention the near gas-free transfers supporting all these cross-chain assets). In short, Openfund will provide all the best qualities of a CEX, plus all the best qualities of a DEX. Many have asked about trading fees. Currently, Openfund allows zero-fee trading. However, when we launch Focus, fees across all markets will increase to 10 basis points, 100% of which will be used for $OPENFUND buyback and burn (pending on-chain voting). This will provide Openfund with a revenue stream while keeping it competitive with all CEXs. Importantly, these revenues will come not just from the major markets like DESO, BTC, ETH and SOL, but from every DeSo token that users list on Focus.
More importantly, since the fees are set at the blockchain level, they will accrue to Openfund regardless of whether the trade happens on Focus or Openfund (Focus will have its own separate fee model to be announced). Finally, Openfund will receive major UI/UX improvements to make it as good or better than any centralized exchange in the space. You can see the update screenshots I've attached. Some of these will ship before the Focus launch, and others shortly after. It's easy to get caught up in the "CEX listing is so important" narrative. But this view is outdated and fails to recognize how much better the fully decentralized UX can be on modern blockchains like DeSo, especially with the extremely advanced automated market making infrastructure we're investing in. With everything we're building, I'm confident that over time, CEXs will not only lose market share to DEXs, including for cross-chain trading, but that Openfund, Focus and the DeSo DEX will play a key role in that transition.
In the meantime, I encourage everyone trading DESO to try out Openfund at openfund.com/trade. Connect your wallet, place some orders, and compare the experience to your Coinbase one, and see how it evolves over the coming weeks as we roll out upgrades.
