Pad Digest #3: March Update and Rising to the Challenge — A Perspective on Building Decentralized Alternatives Amidst Regulatory Pressure on Centralized Exchanges

This month has been a busy one! We’ve made a lot of progress and some exciting developments in our quest towards building a fair, open, scalable, and accessible DeFi hub on Aurora.

Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges have been facing a challenging time recently, with regulatory bodies imposing unfair restrictions on them. These restrictions have been aimed at stifling the crypto ecosystem as a whole, with the aim of limiting its growth and development. However, this situation has only served to highlight one of the core tenets of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the need for decentralization.

Decentralization is the idea that there should be no central authority controlling the network, and that all participants should have an equal say in how it is run. This means that there is no central point of control, and no one person or entity has the power to make decisions that affect the entire network. This is why Bitcoin was created, to provide a decentralized alternative to the traditional financial system.

Since the collapse of FTX, there has been a significant increase in the use of decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Week over week, DEX volumes have been growing, and recent events with Binance and Coinbase have only strengthened this trend. These centralized exchanges have faced regulatory scrutiny, leading to some users seeking more secure and decentralized alternatives. This trend is expected to continue as regulators continue to put pressure on centralized exchanges.

The Pad team has been aware of the importance of decentralization from day one. We have been working tirelessly to build robust products that facilitate the growth of decentralized exchanges and products for users. Our goal is to provide a secure and user-friendly platform that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies with confidence, without the need for a centralized intermediary.

The situation with centralized exchanges is serious, and we believe that the future of the cryptocurrency ecosystem depends on the success of decentralized alternatives. As such, we will continue to work hard to provide innovative solutions that promote decentralization and allow for the growth and development of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. We believe that by embracing decentralization, we can create a more fair, transparent, and inclusive financial system that benefits everyone, not just a select few.

Website Update

The website has undergone quality-of-life improvements, including a rewrite of the animation code to be faster and more responsive. This was the major culprit in making our site feel slow and clunky. The website should now load faster on mobile devices, and the animations should run smoother than ever before. We also improved the way images are resized and cropped to make sure they look great across all screen sizes

DEX Aggregator Update

The DEX aggregator UI is now in development with the first draft submitted for review. Our design philosophy remains committed to creating an intuitive and user-friendly interface for users of all backgrounds to experience and interact with the DEX aggregator.

On the backend side, the trade path availability API is now deployed on our testing server and is being optimised for arbitrage. What this means is the routing logic can quickly calculate the different trading paths across all supported liquidity pools, arbitrage opportunities, and effective routing to capture the maximum return on any given order at any given time. For example, if a user wants to swap $100k $USDC to $ETH, but there is enough arbitrage across multiple pairs to warrant a trade path involving multiple swaps — for instance, $15k swapped between $USDC/$USDT, then $USDT/$ETH, then another $15k swapped between $USDC/$WBTC then $WBT/$ETH — our routing logic is capable of executing this.

Based on the preliminary results of our testing, we’re pleased with how things are progressing and look forward to sharing our progress with you.

See you in our next issue

Pad.fi Links
Website: https://pad.fi/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pad_finance
Discord: https://discord.gg/wUzSSUFkc9
Telegram: https://t.me/nearpad