Coinbase Backs New Ethereum-based DEX to Rival Uniswap

Coinbase, Dragonfly Capital and Huobi today invested $500,000 in CoFiX, a decentralized exchange. 

CoFiX, founded in March by a Chinese-speaking team, falls under the umbrella term of decentralized financedecentralized finance. The term, also known as DeFi, refers to a multitude of non-custodial crypto financial products, such as loans, decentralized stablecoins and other synthetic derivatives, and decentralized exchanges—many of which popped up this summer.

CoFiX is a decentralized exchange, or DEX, that’ll launch on Friday. It works a little like Uniswap, the most popular decentralized exchange, whose trading volumes occasionally overtake those on leading US-based crypto exchange Coinbase—the company that today announced its investment in CoFiX. DEXs are non-custodial cryptocurrency exchanges bankrolled by their users, who earn fees for providing liquidityliquidity for tokentoken pairings. 

Trading Volume on Ethereum-based DEX Uniswap Beats Coinbase Pro

Uniswap’s daily trading volume today hit new highs—surpassing Coinbase Pro’s daily volume for the first time.  The Ethereum-based decentralized exchange and liquidity provider’s trading volume stood at over $441 million at the time of writing, according to its online stats. That’s a 70% increase in the past 24 hours.  Meanwhile, the 24-hour trading volume of Coinbase Pro—Coinbase’s full-service crypto exchange—stood at just over $373 million, according to CoinMarketCap data.  Both Uniswap and C...

But Uniswap is not great for professional traders. You can’t place complicated trades on it and prices of coins are either grabbed from centralized exchanges or discovered through trades, both of which can be pricey for traders paying hefty transaction fees. 

CoFix’s aims to improve on these sorts of decentralized exchanges by scraping prices from a decentralized oracle protocol called NEST—which, like Uniswap, is built on Ethereum. NEST uses various financial parameters to create price feeds that are closer to those found elsewhere. NEST does this by paying its miners to quote prices.

This, at least in theory, should lower prices and risk for traders and remove price arbitraging; those providing liquidity for these trades would also benefit from this by receiving “sustainable profits,” according to the press release. 

CoFiX is slated for release on October 9. Founding members include DeFi wallet project AlphaWallet, blockchain security team SECBIT, and the team’s whitepaper author, “Zaugust”—an “expert in financial product design,” according to CoFiX’sTelegram group.