As we were trying to come up with examples to highlight the importance of decentralization and privacy key management, our case was made stronger by the unfortunate Binance hack yesterday. The biggest crypto exchange in terms of trade volume, at almost $800 million daily, and widely considered reliable and trustworthy hitherto, saw hackers steal $40 million worth Bitcoins from its hot wallets.

Not Your Keys, Not Your Bitcoin

Centralized exchanges such as Binance force users to give up custody in exchange for speed and liquidity. While this is the first attack on Binance, such attacks are quite common — over $2 billion has been stolen from centralized exchanges in just 2018!

There are two key solutions which we believe can completely eliminate exchange-level hacks — decentralized exchanges and private key management solutions.

Decentralized Exchanges

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), especially 0x-based exchanges such as ForDeX and Radar Relay are the real deal, long term.

DEXs capture the true power of blockchains and smart contracting. Centralized Exchanges are not ‘crypto-native’, they are a traditional market construct that has been force fitted into the blockchain paradigm. Unlike a centralized exchange like Nasdaq which will make you ‘whole’ in the unlikely event that they somehow misplace any of your shares, with crypto centralized exchanges, you are just letting your tokens sit in massive hacker honey pots that are ridiculously easy to hack, without any recourse in case the exchange loses your coins.

In contrast, DEXs are completely trustless, peer-to-peer and have modularization that lets developers separate the platform from the regulatory aspects such as fiat on-off ramps and KYC/AML filters. In an era of rampant hacks and assaults on privacy, DEXs provide an element of true anonymity, much like SSL (Secure Socket Layers) did in the the early days of the internet, truly kicking off e-commerce and transactions on the internet.

DEXs allow for the use of smart contracts to programmatically bring together multiple facets of decentralization that define the new era of distributed finance (DeFi), such as lending and borrowing, leveraging, automated credit assessment (Dharma, Compound, DyDx, Bloom, SALT, ETHLend, etc). DEXs along with stablecoins can also create a robust marketplace for remittances.

In a tokenized economy, DEXs will become critical in seamless value exchange between a diverse array of market participants, most of whom will not be aware that they are being served by a DEX in the background. It is no wonder that the largest centralized exchanges of today such as Coinbase, Binance et al are investing heavily in building and developing DEX technology.

Do DEXs have a problem in the short term? Absolutely, like every other crypto project out there, DEXs have their share of issues. There is the latency, but technologies like Plasma are in the works to solve these. Regulation is still getting to grips with DEXs, as seen from the recent EtherDelta incident. However, the paradigm shift does not happen easily, it is going to take a few iterations. For all we know the end-state for DEXs look as similar to today’s relayers as the iPhone does to the early Ericsson mobile phones!

Investing is like a surfer holding out for the next wave, as Michael Novogratz says. Just hold on. The key is to hold on to a seat when the music stops, so that you are in the game when the markets turn, and the music begins again!

Private Key Management Solutions

Private key management is a complicated, esoteric task and not many users have the technical nous to manage the keys by themselves. Private keys require extreme care and consideration with regards to storage and security. A failure to maintain the utmost of care may result in loss or theft of cryptocurrency. Anyone who has been around the cryptocurrency space for some time has probably heard about cryptocurrency theft. The importance of prudent private key management is further exacerbated by the fact that blockchain transactions are by default irreversible. Once your funds get hacked, it is almost next to impossible to retrieve these lost funds. Crypto custody firms use a combination of cold storage and Hardware Security Module (HSM) solutions to minimize the threat of external hacks.

Centralized exchanges, at least in their current avatar, have a fatal flaw — they are essentially honeypots under constant attack from a variety of motivated, unscrupulous, hackers from around the globe, 24×7; the increasing number of exchange hacks highlights the structural deficiencies in the way crypto exchanges manage private keys for their users. A massive architectural overhaul is needed to guarantee the safety of user funds. This is also the reason why multiple players — ranging from startups to traditional Wall Street institutions (JP Morgan, BNY) to crypto-native entities (such as Coinbase), are all trying to solve the problem of safe, reliable, custody.

We believe that there are multiple strong wallets and retail-level custody solutions which can protect investors from being exposed to the above mentioned hacks. Many are compatible with DEXs such as ForDeX, giving users complete access to their funds while trading.

For the moment, we recommend that you stick to your friendly, neighborhood DEX such as ForDeX ;)for all your crypto trading needs, wherever you are.

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ForDeX is the world’s first stablecoin-focused relayer and is built on top of the 0x-Protocol. Within a few weeks of launch, it is now a Top-5 relayer and is a recipient of 0x Ecosystem Acceleration Grant.

If you are interested in partnering with us, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]. Keep track of our progress on the following channels:Reddit, Twitter, Medium and Telegram.