Decentralized Exchanges: What They Are, How They Work, and Which Ones Still Matter in 2025

When you trade crypto on a decentralized exchange, a platform that lets users swap digital assets directly without a central company holding their money. Also known as DEX, it removes banks, brokers, and middlemen—putting control back in your hands. That sounds simple, but not all DEXes are created equal. Some are built on solid blockchains with deep liquidity and active users. Others? They’re digital ghosts—no trading volume, drained pools, and teams that vanished months ago.

Take Serum Swap, a once-fast order-book DEX built on Solana. It promised to beat Uniswap with speed and low fees. By 2025, its liquidity was gone, its token (SRM) crashed, and no one was trading. Meanwhile, Gravity Finance, a tiny DEX with almost no users or transparency, sits idle—its website barely loads. These aren’t exceptions. They’re warnings. A DEX isn’t just code. It needs people, liquidity, and ongoing work to stay alive.

What separates the real DEXes from the dead ones? Three things: active trading, locked-up funds (liquidity), and a team that still shows up. Uniswap, the largest DEX on Ethereum, with billions locked in pools and millions of monthly trades isn’t just a platform—it’s an ecosystem. Others like PancakeSwap or SushiSwap follow similar patterns. But many newer ones? They launch with hype, promise low fees, and then disappear after the initial token dump. That’s why you’ll find posts here about failed DEXes like Serum Swap and Gravity Finance—not to scare you, but to help you avoid traps.

You’ll also see how some DEXes tie into bigger trends—like how KongSwap, a niche DEX on the Internet Computer lets users swap ICP and SOL with zero gas fees, but has near-zero liquidity. Or how OpenSwap, a platform that doesn’t even exist anymore was flagged as a scam. These aren’t random stories. They’re case studies in what happens when a DEX lacks real demand or transparency.

Decentralized exchanges aren’t just about swapping tokens. They’re about trust, sustainability, and who’s really behind the code. If you’re using one, ask: Is anyone else trading here? Are the funds still locked? Has the team posted anything in the last six months? If not, you’re not trading—you’re gambling on a ghost.

The posts below dive into the real DEXes still working, the ones that died quietly, and the scams pretending to be something they’re not. No fluff. No hype. Just what’s actually happening in the world of decentralized trading in 2025.