From Bitcoin Market to Web3 colonies: How crypto exchanges have evolved over the years

cointelegraph.com:

Phemex, an innovative crypto exchange, is at the forefront of the hybrid trading approach. Rooted in a firm commitment to decentralization, Phemex provides CEX-like liquidity, user-friendly functionalities, and access to DeFi opportunities through its Phemexia ecosystem.

Over the years, cryptocurrency trading venues have come a long way — from the Bitcoin Market exchange owned and operated by a single anonymous user, dwdollar, in 2010 to automated market makers (AMMs) relying on mathematical formulas to price assets a decade later.

Centralized exchanges (CEXs) use an order book where market makers and takers place their orders. Their order books then match buyers and sellers, and the exchanges take a small portion of the transaction as a fee. Their counterparts, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), operate via smart contracts — autonomous code snippets on a blockchain, executing transactions. And users pay gas for their activity on the chain.

Trading venues combining features of CEXs and DEXs, nevertheless, exist already and are called hybrid exchange models. For example, Phemex is one of the leading platforms pioneering such a hybrid, semi-centralized exchange structure.

However different CEXs and DEXs might seem from the current perspective, the timelines of their evolution overlapped a few times, making these exchange models inseparable from one another in the historical context.

In 2012, initial regulatory concerns began to surface, pushing the centralized exchange founders to implement Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies. Over a few years, due to ever-emerging restrictions and decreasing anonymity levels in the crypto niche, the first DEXs, like EtherDelta and IDEX, gained traction.

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