Some more modern decentralised exchanges (DEXes) dealing with leveraged trades and try to minimise centralisation also include YieldBases:
https://yieldbasis.com/markets
There are other exchanges that are much more centralised, like Hyperliquid, and it is incorrect to call these decentralised. But there are truly decentralised alternatives as well.
GMX is not as popular, let's say Binance, because onchain user experience has been very hard. You don't want to sign every order from your crypto wallet. Transaction cost ("gas fee") used to be too high for trading. This is finally changing with the latest Ethereum improvement proposals, dealing with so called account abstraction.
[1] Because futures always settle on an external price, the price feed must come from some oracle. In the case of GMX, there are keepers (multiple of them) who are responsible to bring the correct price to Arbitrum chain and trigger the settlement. But it's not a single party.
There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.
All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.
So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.
The few actual decentralized exchanges are too slow and expensive.
That's one of the sticking points I have with the /idea/ of the technology
> confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction
Yes. synchronisation is where everything breaks down because you have to get everyone to agree to the new state.
edit: Sorry, not everyone, but a consensus, and that consensus is then what everyone agrees is the state.
Key part:
> fully onchain perpetual futures and spot order books
> Importantly, HyperCore does not rely on the crutch of off-chain order books. A core design principle is full decentralization with one consistent order of transactions achieved through HyperBFT consensus.
https://github.com/hyperliquid-dex/node
"For lowest latency, run the node in Tokyo, Japan."
Decentralization means to run all of the closed-source nodes in the same AWS datacenter!
all you can do is run their visor, and they push out whatever proprietary blob they produce and restart "your" nodes at their command.
E.g. GMX on Arbitrum chain is no longer prohibitively expensive.
Left some comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46172450
Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.
It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time. It was supposed to be decentralized, but in practice a few big exchanges control all the transactions and a few big mining pools control all the minting. It was supposed to be "code is law", and yet if you find a big exploit on smart contracts it'll be unwound later on and the cops will still show up for you. And as you say, it was supposed to be trustless, but counterparty risk is everywhere.
And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
I agree 100% - Meme stocks go brrrrrrrr
The idea that it's a currency that lives beyond the reach of governments is laughable (as soon as something goes bang a lot of the owners call for... regulators and government oversight)
Even the vast majority of free-market maximalists will support a government bailout of large banks or the auto industry if it will save their investment portfolio.
Mostly, meme coins go into a screaming dive after the initial pump. Go type some meme coin names into Coinmarketcap.
Except for Bitcoin and Ethereum, almost everything in crypto has crashed hard.
It's incredibly difficult to see either instrument as a currency, or a share, or an asset other than the fact that other people will (at this point) buy it back off you for more than you paid for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador
> The adoption was criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy. In 2024, El Salvador agreed to partially limit its involvement with Bitcoin as part of a deal made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2025, The Economist wrote that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.[4]
> In 2025, Bitcoin was rescinded as legal tender in El Salvador.[5] Besides the aforementioned problems and hacking incidents, research showed it was rarely used by the public.[5]
The Central African Republic has had similar (well worse really) experience
This is a joke right? Tether (USDT) is pegged to the dollar... and there is not really a limit to the USD printing machine, nobody ever claimed a stablecoin would have a limited supply. It's literally the main critique of the fiat system levied by crypto proponents.
The only asset which has made and still hold promises of not increasing its supply over its limit set through its consensus code is Bitcoin. And it is nowhere close to ever change... as a matter of fact if it changed, most people wouldn't call that fork Bitcoin.
But the claim about USDT ever claiming that its supply wouldn't increase is pure fantasy. It literally makes no sense if you understand how the peg is maintained (technically by minting and burning tokens).
and not only will other people worldwide use it immediately, they will also pay for all your infrastructure costs as they update the chain state with every transaction fee that they pay
the permissionless nature means you can deploy anything as cenralized or decentralized as you want, and its up to consumers to be discerning and its only their fault if they are not
cost wise this will always be attractive to developers and for them to bring over every audience they can muster, because web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
Can I leverage trade derivatives and also earn fees from liquidity pooling with Robux?
Web 2.0 based on boring old primitives like ad dollars and banks actually funds things that in real life provide ultimately virtually all the actual utility obtained by the world from software.
You said
> web 2.0 cloud cannot compete with that cost structure and permissionless nature
It appears to me that that is just incorrect on its face because web 2.0 cloud actually DOES compete insofar as its literally everywhere as we speak and web 3.0 is a buzzword from 2014 that has yet to achieve actual meaning.
To rephrase do you feel it is accurate to say that something that represents basically all the real value obtained by network computers doesn't competes with something that provides? What again?
Ask an AI about it to catch up, this is a decade too late to have that conversation
the only thing that matters is that there is liquidity and permissionless deployment, we are far far beyond “should there be liquidity”, you can build business on smart contract platforms solely because there is liquidity and people with frictions you can solve just like any other industry or the financial services sector in general