News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kinship7

kinship7 on Hacker News

Prove me wrong – decentralized exchanges are a clear Web3 use case

Posted by kinship7 on Monday June 20, 2022 @03:38PM
from the self-post dept.

I've seen a lot of healthy skepticism around web3, and a failure of web3 proponents to provide clear use cases. So I'd like to provide one: a decentralized exchange, or DEX. A DEX is an exchange in which order matching and execution occurs via smart contracts on-chain, rather than through a centralized entity. That gives DEX’s the following advantages over CEX’s: - instant (minutes depending on...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Why Web3? on Saturday January 01, 2022 @11:25PM (#29765814)
Distributed wireless infrastructure is very real and a pretty clear use case of web3. Helium Network sells wireless routers, and distributes rewards to routers that provide coverage to the network. Tokens are used to purchase network bandwidth. They have nearly 400K hotspots worldwide. It's also not using the energy-intensive Proof of Work consensus algorithm that you're referring to.
Re:Why Web3? on Saturday January 01, 2022 @11:21PM (#29765794)
I agree that statement around market power is wrong. What I'm hopeful about, is that Web3 increases the amount of the stack that is open to anyone to build on top of. That will hopefully increase competition and decrease rent-seeking by whichever dominant players emerge.
Re:Why Web3? on Saturday January 01, 2022 @11:17PM (#29765778)
You're right that the UX layer could be centralized. However, the data that the UX is built on would not be centralized. In the Uber example, it's as if the ride-hailing backend were available to anyone.

The centralized UX could censor transactions like you say, but the barrier to entry is low for another UX, built on the same decentralized data, to emerge and challenge the centralized UX. That's because the data is available to everyone.

Re:Why Web3? on Friday December 31, 2021 @02:58AM (#29745930)
Rugpulls and other hacks are a risk, but will become less of a risk over time as the tech gets more stable, and third party insurance solutions like Nexus Mutual become more widespread.

The better customer experience in the lending example is higher yields on savings and checking accounts.