If you wanted to trade through Uniswap or Kyber, the process has always been straightforward – just go to their website. But what if you wanted to trade through 0x? Where would you go then? This might seem trivial but it’s challenging to grow a userbase when it’s confusing for people to navigate your product and the customer experience is ultimately out of your control. After all, 0x doesn’t operate it’s own exchange. At least it didn’t, until now – meet Matcha.
In our 0x research report from November, one of our main critiques was that 0x was too reliant on third-party relayers to provide the consumer facing experience. As a quick refresher, relayers are independent businesses that build on top of 0x Protocol, which they leverage to run their own standalone exchanges. This model can not only lead to fragmented liquidity, but also a fragmented user experience. An argument could be made over which is worse.
Since the launch of 0x v3 in December, the development team has taken steps to rectify some of the issues that were present in their old design. The two main product solutions have been 0x Mesh, a way to share orders P2P without relayers, and 0x API, a liquidity aggregator that combines native 0x orders with external on-chain sources. On April 15th, the development team took another step in the right direction when they announced Matcha, the first in-house exchange built on top of the protocol. Matcha leverages 0x API for liquidity aggregation in order to provide a single-point of access. Per its website, Matcha is expected to go live at some point in Q2 2020. Will this be enough to differentiate 0x in a sea of other DEXs and liquidity aggregators? Our team has signed up for early access to help us answer that question. We’ll keep our members posted.
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