Centralization

A feature-rich DEX hopes to lure traders in with new tools and liquidity via Binance.

Alameda Research’s latest investment is aiming to build some tricky bridges between decentralized and centralized systems.

This morning, Cryptocurrencies.AI (‘CCAI’) announced a $8 million raise led by Alameda Research, DFG, Rarestone Capital, and half a dozen other funds. The raise will be used to help bolster the exchange’s efforts to provide a bevvy of user experience perks and features often lacking in decentralized exchanges.

Among the features touted are built-in tools for automated trading and bots, as well as notes, calendars, and performance tracking — all of which are hypothetically available to users of exchanges like Uniswap, but only through third-party add-ons and not natively built into the interface.

In press release this morning, CCAI founder Hisham Khan says that bringing these tools and the exchange under the same umbrella will enable traders of all stripes to access additional utility and efficiency.

“From traditional financial institutions to the retail traders of Gen Z, digital assets and Bitcoin are already creating substantial changes in the lives of people from a range of demographics. But the industry all too often accepts frustratingly poor user experience and fragmentation as both crypto natives and newcomers are forced to use a variety of different tools to optimize their trading strategies. We’re changing that by bringing everything into one place.”

Additionally, the exchange features a hybrid centralized/decentralized model that leverages an integration with Binance to offer traders additional liquidity and UX options.

“The Binance integration helps with the liquidity, then we provide our own innovative features on top of it through the exchange,” said Khan in an interview with Cointelegraph. “It’s the only one in the industry that offers such innovative tools for automation, enabling traders to get access to these risk management settings.”

The hybrid model does come with trade-offs, however. Much like the somewhat maligned and recently-announced Aave institutional lending pool, users will have to submit to KYC/AML requirements — a long-awaited “CeDeFi” development that some observers warn could “kill” the theoretically permissionless DeFi movement.

Khan notes that while users will need to KYC to access the liquidity benefits of the platform, “the DEX is not currently going to have KYC/AML,” and that “it’s fully decentralized."