But replace with what? With people like Vitalik? He seems to be an influential figure and calling the shots. How is this in any way different than a "normal" company with a CEO and a board.
Uniswap was the first well-done AMM (automated market maker) design. It's on version 3 now, and has traded more than $1.2 trillion in volume: https://uniswap.org/
The smart contracts are posted here: https://github.com/Uniswap/v3-core and can be viewed directly onchain as well: https://etherscan.io/address/0x68b3465833fb72a70ecdf485e0e4c...
FTX was primarily used for perpetuals trading, which is a type of leveraged derivative product. Popular decentralized perp products include: GMX: https://gmx.io/#/ and Dydx: https://dydx.exchange/
Vitalik is certainly influential, and he did conceive of and invent the first smart contract blockchain, but he doesn't call the shots any more than Tim Berners-Lee controls the web.
It's partly also because you have to bridge from traditional finance to cryptocurrency somehow. Many of these centralized exchanges are allowing that bridging. Usually that would involve meeting strict banking and KYC regulations. FTX decided that was too much of a hassle and incorporated in Bahamas to avoid it.
A lot of crypto people do use Uniswap. The tone of Vitalik’s post is: what if we took some of the non custodial, on-chain, cryptographic proof things that work well in a DEX, and inject them into more CEXes so that even lazy users end up with better security guarantees.
(Parent of copied answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33690213)
> But replace with what?
Ideally, open-sourced & audited smart contracts that are ERC-compliant & developed by the general public, with the internal mechanisms made viewable to anyone that wants to learn how such mechanisms work.
> With people like Vitalik? He seems to be an influential figure and calling the shots.
Vitalik can point at where focus could be targeted at, but the decision is ultimately up to the developers themselves. In fact, as far as I can remember, most of the efforts mentioned in the post & image below are not publicly mentioned at all, with other developers leading the charge on that front. (Danksharding being one example, with the development efforts led by Dankrad Feist, hence the name.)
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/158866978247136870...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgwVhUjaAAEx_Bb?format=jpg&name=...
> How is this in any way different than a "normal" company with a CEO and a board?
The main difference is that development is not wholly left to one party: Anyone can choose to develop the applications that they want to see & deploy them onto the platform. Even if you're external from the main development efforts, you can still contribute to the overall ecosystem with code contributions towards one of the various nodes of the entire system. This stands in contrast with a standard company, where external development's forbidden outside of a special area designated for the general public to interact with.
I fully expect that system to come crashing down in 5-10 year.
Ultimately layer 0 of a blockchain is the community that uses it, and if they decide to fork en masse, they will do so. It's an essential property of the system itself. Blockchains would not be antifragile if they could not fork.
He already did that once, and could do it again.