Decentralized exchanges with no oversight or accountability and the ability to "mint" an endless supply of their own crypto and influence it's price.
Most people coming from the traditional finance world understand the de-value in this.
Most people coming from the traditional finance world understand the de-value in this.
If you are sophisticated (or even just have a functioning brain instead of a void between your ears) you can easily:
1) Avoid assets that are inflationary, by conducting your own due diligance, or even better inspect the code of the smart contract to determine if minting is even possible.
2) No oversight is a feature not a bug. Nobody forces you to trade, but knowing the rules of the game are unalterable is ultimately the best arbiter of active capital allocation decisions. Did you follow the story of the LME and Nickel futures over the last fortnight? That market is now bust and the LME's reputation is (rightly) in tatters.
3) Having worked as a trader at a blue chip investment bank and then at a hedge fund for many years I am almost positive despite the present clunkiness and inefficency of some AMM based DeFi exchanges, this model is the future of exchange. CLOB's are manipulated just as much (if not more) than DeFi/CEX OB's.
This is being used in more than half of all crypto trades and can easily be used to influence crypto prices across the board.
There is really nothing "free" about a market where the market makers are also active players with an unlimited supply of funds. And without a "free market", most everything else is irrelevant.
For your info an example of a decentralized exchange is "Uniswap" which operates onchain and does not (in most circumstances) custody your assets or even have humans in the loop. A centralised exchange is Binance, which largely operates fully off chain and custodies your assets.
Lastly I dont think anyone is pretending the space is not without risks - its a "caveat emptor" environment in its purest form. USDT isnt the only game in town by a mile & congruently Jump/Jane Street/Hudson River/other U.S. regulated actors have no problem acting as a credit counterparty with USDT so due diligence must check out to some degree of satisfaction (indeed I hold my own reservations).
Decentralized exchanges simply follow the centralized exchange market. It is the only available, practical way for anyone to set prices.
What the centralized exchanges do affects the entire market by sheer force of their trading volume.
Decentralized exchanges can't just mint more tokens, unless they deployed the token for that contract with an allowance for them to mint it.
AKA, the largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap, does have a Uniswap token. But they can't just mint it whenever/however they want, the contract (which anyone can audit) doesn't allow it
What is being traded is less interesting than the fact that it can be traded 24/7, cheaply, globally, transparently, pseudoanonymously, settle instantly, and with no counterparty risk.
Nothing like this has ever been achieved in human history, any other observations are a distraction.
Saws are not useful because they can cut your hand off? Fire is not useful because it can burn your house down?
But as to markets, for every valid critique you can present against decentralized and/or anonymous markets, there is an equally valid critique to be made against centralized & controlled markets.