The share of decentralized exchanges’ spot trading volume has rapidly grown since September. Despite CEX's general dominance, the trend can be seen from as early as 2020. According to The Block, DEX to CEX trading volume reached its ATH of 23% this month, indicating that projects and traders increasingly lean towards decentralized exchanges.

The primary driver of this trend on the part of the projects might be the high cost associated with listing on CEXs. For instance, Binance reportedly charges up to 15% of a project's total token supply for a listing. Coinbase claimed that listing is free, but this assertion has been challenged on social media. Smaller CEXs demand between $250,000 and $500,000 plus deposit and marketing costs. 

Although listing on Binance or another top-tier exchange is prestigious, no coin is exempt from price drops. After the project pays the unaffordable bills, many overvalued tokens drop. Arthur Hayes believes that VCs are part of the scheme: the companies are interested in prestigious listings to push for high estimates of a crypto project and make their investments look better. While VCs secure profits early, retail investors are often left with useless tokens.

At the same time, as the broader crypto community has become more experienced and confident over the years, DEXs have become more suitable for average users. Now, as crypto is relatively familiar, transparency, user control, autonomy, privacy, and lower fees are priorities for many. The meme-coin frenzy also helped lift the veto on using DEXs, attracting millions of people to Uniswap, Solana’s decentralized exchanges, and other platforms. The rapid development of L2 scaling solutions and cross-chain bridges also enhances DEX functionality and lowers fees. Users now opt for DEXs that offer broader options for community-driven, long-tail, and niche asset trading, allow more possibilities in cross-chain trading, and are, in general, far more flexible.

After the introduction of the Automated Market Maker model in 2018, DEXs entered the competition race with CEXs. To narrow the gap, decentralized exchanges enhance user experience and explore novel business models and technologies. Most decentralized platforms have improved functionality and partially mitigated liquidity challenges by introducing new features like liquidity mining, staking, and governance tokens to incentivize liquidity provision. Some DEXs, such as Polkaswap and dYdX, provide an order book functionality.

As the major DEXs are now barely different from CEXs in terms of UX and UI, newcomers can feel safe and comfortable.

The fact that DEXs are not subject to regulatory pressures, sanctions, and potential centralization risks gives them another crucial competitive edge. However, this decentralized nature might attract greater attention from regulators on their way to supervise the industry as soon as they sort it all out with CEXs.

Although the DEXs' current market share of 19% remains relatively low, the underlying reasons for that trend might further fuel the shift. As the market adjusts to the changes, the cumulative number of DEXs is growing at a faster pace than the amount of CEXs. It is also likely that hybrid cryptocurrency exchanges that truly merge the advantages of both approaches might gain momentum in the future.

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