alt Hacker NewsIt's striking how much the crypto world depends on trust in other parties. The whole point of crypto was supposed to be that it was "trustless". But it's not set up that way. All these crypto derivatives are not set up as contracts on a blockchain, with assets locked up until the derivatives settle. They're book entries with some weakly regulated exchange in Outer Nowhere.
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The people who want trustless decentralization and the people who want leveraged gambling and the people who want KYC-free international money transfer may be different people. The only problem with Liberty Reserve was that it got shut down; if a "decentralied" fig leaf can allow it to operate... let there be "decentralization".
Different cryptocurrency products offer different properties and guarantees. Much like different databases offer different concurrency models. Folks that use currency backed stablecoins do not care for the trustless properties. There are various algorithmic stablecoins out there that you can use to stay free of KYC/AML but they aren't very popular.
Largely the folks that want trustless currency use chains like BTC, BCH, XMR, or ZEC.
It was the case up until recently. But today Hyperliquid does it on chain and very popular.
That's not true with decentralised exchanges like hyperliquid, no?
whats more important to me is that you don't have to ask anybody if you can deploy an entire financial services suite
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
By now crypto-in-practice has violated so many of its supposed founding principles that it's tired and cliche to point it out.
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.
You can trade perpetual futures, onchain, mostly decentralised, in self-custodial manner [1] e.g. on GMX
https://gmx.io/
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.