Decentralized blockchain tokens are being traded on very centralized exchanges. Essentially it's a contradiction in terms, that manifests itself in these exchanges being hacked all the time. You just can't trust a centralized service with your decentralized tokens. Bitcoin and other crypto is a perfect thing to steal, transactions are non-reversible, transfers are hard to trace. Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are not sustainable in the long run, since the cost of an successful attack can ruin any successful exchange.
On the other hand, until we have very high blockchain transactions throughput, we can't have a comfortable solution for a completely decentralized trading. Putting all trading data on the blockchain is doable, but you have to deal with blockchain latency and tons of data which you have to synchronize over all the nodes.
There's a solution in between, and this is the path we have taken — you can do the blockchain settlement but order matching is done in a centralized manner. What does it mean in layman's terms — there's a server which matches incoming orders, but has no access to your funds. There's no chance that you could lose money in this setup, since you have full control over your funds at all times. When the server finds a matching pair it initiates the transfer on the blockchain which moves the funds. The correctness of the matching is verified in a decentralized way, and no funds can be transferred if the orders are not matched properly.
This is a new approach that can be called "Matching as a service". You can mount your own Waves matcher and earn commissions. Probably we don't need to try to decentralize everything at this stage of blockchain protocols development, focusing only on areas where blockchain really improves things considerably. When you need high execution speed centralized solutions work better. Putting the trustless blockchain technology on top you get the best of the two worlds — speed of centralized services combined with blockchain security.
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