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Decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes are up 236% from Q4 2020, Uniswap leading the way as volumes continue to rise in lockstep with asset prices.

May is turning out to be another big month for decentralized exchanges (DEX) with $85 billion of volume halfway through the month, and on pace to reach $140 billion for the full month. That's more than 2x more than the previous record set in April.

Trading volume on decentralized crypto exchanges (DEXs) has surged in the last year - and is up over 1500% since January 1st. The growth has been driven by a rising demand to trade ERC20 tokens, accompanying a booming decentralized finance (DeFi) sector on Ethereum (ETH). The top 3 exchanges Uniswap, Balancer and Curve accounting for over 90% of all DEX volume. Of these, Uniswap, an open-source project developed by Hayden Adams that allows users to swap in and out of ERC-20 tokens, is far and away the leader with a market share of 67%.

Richard Turrin alerted me to the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) JAM-DEX frequently asked questions (FAQ), and provides a nice summary here. Interestingly, the BOJ is not imposing any holding or transaction limits on the use of the central bank digital currency (CBDC). Instead, it is relying on banks to use their own risk management assessment to determine limits. For now, the Lynk wallet limits cashing in to J$50,000 (about $325) daily from a bank account, and J$50,000 monthly from a debit/credit card. For cashing out, limit is J$100,000 daily for a bank account. For transferring to another Lynk user, the limit is J$100,000 daily.

Jamaica's Ministry of Industry, Investment, and Commerce has confirmed the development of a digital marketplace for merchants and residents to interact using the country's central bank digital currency (CBDC). Its aim is to provide a platform for underserved merchants, who do not have access to processing debit and credit transactions, to exclusively use Jam-Dex as a means of exchange. The digital marketplace will also facilitate merchants advertising their products. Onboarding merchants has already started and the platform should be operational by the beginning of summer (2023).

Bank of Jamaica's central bank digital currency (CBDC) now has a name - Jamaica Digital Exchange or JAM-DEX for short, with the tagline "no cash, no problem!" The pilot was completed in December 2021 and launch is expected during the first quarter of 2022.

"Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) is pleased to announce the successful use of its Central Bank Digital Currency (JAM-DEX), as a means of payment to facilitate a critical segment of Government payments - the Employment Generation (Christmas Work) Programme."

John McAfee has launched a decentralized exchange (DEX) running on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain.

Ethereum toolkit MetaMask now allows users to swap tokens from within the app itself. MetaMask owner ConsenSys said saying that the new feature would request token prices from decentralized exchanges and aggregators so that users can get the best prices. MetaMask will support Uniswap, Airswap, Kyber, 0x API, 1inch.exchange, dex.ag, Paraswap, Totle, and private market makers for the feature. This approach means that users won't need to navigate these platforms individually to find the optimal price. The feature is initially available to users of the MetaMask extension on the Firefox browser and will be rolled out soon to other browsers and MetaMask Mobile.

"Critics are slamming Cardano smart-contract testnet errors and complained that the blockchain wasn't fit for purpose as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. Difficulties around multiple users interacting with the protocol at the same time surfaced as developers launched the long-awaited Alonzo testnet, which introduces smart contracts to the platform for the first time. These concurrency issues meant that the first Cardano dApp-a multi-pool decentralized exchange (DEX) named Minswap-was forced to prematurely shut down its testnet."

Jack Dorsey, co-founder, and CEO of both Square and Twitter, released a white paper detailing plans for Square's decentralized Bitcoin exchange tbDEX. Unlike most decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, tbDEX will not utilize a trustless model, and therefore will not feature its own governance token. Instead, it is a message protocol designed to facilitate trust relationships without relying on a federation to control access.

"Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges" uncovers a number of significant details surrounding the activity of malicious trading bots on decentralized exchanges.

The first 100,000 Jamaicans establishing Jam-Dex Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) wallets (accounts) after April 1, will receive a $2,500 deposit from the Government. Minister of Finance and the Public Service Nigel Clarke advised that four more wallet providers are expected to be onboarded by the Bank of Jamaica by June, to bring the overall number to five. The national CBDC rollout is scheduled sometime between the beginning of the April to and the end of June.

The Digital Dollar Project completed a proof-of-concept (PoC) with Western Union, BDO Unibank and Accenture that evaluated the potential benefits of using central bank digital currency (CBDC) for cross-border remittances. The platform leveraged distributed ledger technology (DLT) to simulate the payments infrastructure necessary to transfer digital dollars to Philippine pesos. A decentralized exchange (DEX) provided a market for currency pair exchange to explore potential benefits associated with a decentralized marketplace to improve competition and price transparency. The PoC found that CBDCs may improve remittance processing by settling a peer-to- peer payment in less than ten seconds, a key driver being atomic settlement, which reduced counterparty risk and optimized liquidity via streamlined foreign exchange (FX) spot orders and multi-party settlement.

"The immaculate adoption doctrine is wrong. CBDC will probably just be a middling payments product. Existing options like cash, insured deposits and fintech balances work just fine for most folks, CBDC adding no extra features to the mix. It's just not possible to take a middling payments product and launch it, effortlessly and immaculately, into wide adoption. A big and expensive marketing push from central banks will be required if CBDC is to ever be adopted, Jamaica's Jam-Dex being a good example. And even then there's no guarantee of success."

Etonec and Mina Foundation will roll out a new zero-knowledge (ZK) proof-powered regulatory compliance tool for the decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 space. It will address gaps within the privacy and compliance space by providing know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) services on the Lumina DEX when it goes live later this year. The prototype is powered by zkApps, which enables private and compliant transactions. https://www.etonec.com/post/etonec-partners-with-mina-to-address-trade-offs-between-privacy-compliance-and-decentralization

eCurrency has entered into a long-term partnership with Bank of Jamaica to provide technology services for the national rollout of its JAM-DEX CBDC.

"As of August 2022, blockchain-based assets boast a combined market capitalisation exceeding one trillion USD, among which the most prominent are the decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) tokens associated with decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols. In this work, we seek to value DeFi tokens using the canonical multiples and Discount Cash Flow (DCF) approaches. We examine a subset of DeFi services including decentralised exchanges (DEXs), protocol for loanable funds (PLFs), and yield aggregators. We apply the same analysis to some publicly traded firms and compare them with DeFi tokens of the analogous category. Interestingly, despite the crypto bear market lasting for more than one year as of August 2022, both approaches evidence overvaluation in DeFi."

"Recent advancements in decentralized finance (DeFi) have resulted in a rapid increase in the use of Automated Market Makers (AMMs) for creating decentralized exchanges (DEXs). In this paper, we organize these developments by treating an AMM as a neoclassical black-box characterized by the conversion of inputs (tokens) to outputs (prices). The conversion is governed by the technology of the AMM summarized by an 'exchange function'. Various types of AMMs are examined, including: Constant Product Market Makers; Constant Mean Market Makers; Constant Sum Market Makers; Hybrid Function Market Makers; and, Dynamic Automated Market Makers. The paper also looks at the impact of introducing concentrated liquidity in an AMM. Overall, the framework presented here provides an intuitive geometric representation of how an AMM operates, and a clear delineation of the similarities and differences across the various types of AMMs."