CEX vs DEX - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hey guys. Well, thanks for having us. Um, welcome to Singapore. Uh, I know you guys are all coming from different parts of the world. Um, so here we are.

Every year during token 2049, we hear from the best of the industry. Just a quick introduction, I'm Emma. Uh, I'm running Long Hash Ventures, which is the early stage crypto fund since 2018. Um, and here we have uh a bunch of really top builders in the space. We've got Armani from Backpack.

We've got Ogo from uh AmericanFang. We've got Craze from uh Drift Protocol. And I'm sure this um protocols are no strangers to you guys. Um maybe let's take two minutes for each panel to quickly introduce themselves and also their their backgrounds and what led them to where they are today. Shall we start with you Amani?

Yeah, sure thing. Happy to be here. Uh my name is Armani Ferrante, founder CEO of Backpack. Uh chief mad lad, I suppose. Um what got me into crypto?

Ethereum white paper. Uh it's kind of as simple as that. Uh yeah,

nice. What were you building before Backpack? And you can kind of walk us through your

Yeah, so what I was building before Backpack, I mean, a bunch of things. So, uh got into crypto in 2017. Uh worked on anything and everything. uh uh whether it was you know a brief stint at Alamita Research uh was uh working on Ethereum L2s kind of in 2018 uh worked on other L1s and then came into Salana in 2020 and had the opportunity to work on a lot of the early uh projects on the ecosystem. So worked on the first decentralized exchange, the first central limit order book on any blockchain ever.

Um got to build one of the first wallets, built, you know, the first developer framework for building smart contracts. Uh just a lot of stuff because nothing existed at the time. And so yeah, I've been doing a bunch of stuff since then.

I think it's so fitting to have Ammani on the um panel today given we're talking about sex versus sex. I think you guys are kind of building both. So love to hear your takes later. And would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah. Yeah. I feel so small next to a Chad like Armani, but uh I'll do my best. Um so my name's Ogle. I got into uh Bitcoin in late 2012, give or take, and built a few things.

Um I was mostly known for doing hack recovery for a long time. And I think um that's kind of if anyone knows who I am, that's probably what it is. But lately, I've been working on um a project called America.fun. And America Fun is basically a launchpad that's semi-curreated.

So you have like a lot of DJ launchpads, which are like uh Pump Fun and Bonk, etc. And then you have kind of ICM which are very u you know regulatory compliant and so forth. And then in between there we have a semi-curated uh type of type of experience. We're trying to make this a little bit safer uh a little bit more like AOL used to be and that's why the ticker is AOL. So focusing on that right now building on Salana and uh looking forward to chatting with everyone here on the stage.

I think you you come with a unique costume today. So I think you take security very seriously.

Yeah. The reason for the

get your take later.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's it's it's existentially important. You know, whenever you deal with security related things, uh sometimes you have actual real security issues and so I've got to be careful.

Yeah. Yeah. Um and Chris.

Yeah. Hey everybody. I'm Chris, more well known as low per on the internet. Uh one of the technical co-founders of Drift. Before working on Drift, I was a software engineer at Amazon.

Then during the COVID lockdown, just went down crypto rabbit hole. uh fell in love with Salana community and tech and been building Drift on there since 2021.

Awesome. Um and the backstage I just learned that Chris met Cindy the co-founder over Twitter. I didn't know that can really happen. I but I guess in crypto anything is possible. Um so just to I guess level set the conversation I would love to kind of start with a quick framework right as we talk about sex versus DEX.

um centralized exchanges has been dominating crypto for the longest time, right? There's very powerful exchanges, right? Before token can gain access to the to the public. Um but DEX has been gaining market share as the technology progresses, right? There's more and more things that can be built on blockchain and uh uh more and more people uh learned how to interact with uh DAXis on blockchain.

Um so I would love to kind of maybe quickly throw the question to the panelists, right? um what are some of the limit kind of advantages and disadvantages you're seeing right when we compare DEX versus uh sex?

Yeah. So

maybe to create a framework for the conversation.

Yeah, that would be great.

I think a lot of people like to have this discussion in the context of the decentralization spectrum where on one side of the spectrum you're centralized and on the other side of the spec spectrum you are decentralized. Um, I think that's I kind of reject the framing because there's a bunch of nuances with exchanges in particular margin systems that uh uh kind of make that framing kind of the wrong way to look at it.

Um, ultimately whether you're building, you know, a centralized exchange or decentralized exchange, you should always view things through the lens of security and risk.

Yeah. And so the way to evaluate an exchange in my view is through a couple kind of key categories.

Um the first is through the lens of of custody. Yep.

Um the second is through the lens of of margin risk management. Y

and then the third as we're kind of talking about in the in the backstage through the lens of

market integrity. And if you evaluate exchanges through this lens, you could kind of throw away the whole decentralized and and and centralized uh conversation and really focus on what matters,

which is, you know, minimizing error and minimizing all the issues that you see in, you know, traditional finance.

Yeah.

Um and each kind of uh uh point in the design space gives you different trade-offs uh uh with each one of these categories.

So custody is generally what people like to think about. Yeah.

Um, you know, you look at stuff like, uh, I mean, not to throw bit under the under the rug, but they're the most famous example of of like risk.

Um, I mean, the irony with BBIT was that it wasn't actually a centralized exchange problem. That was actually a hack of of safe. It was the DeFi product that got that got hacked. Um, the DeFi front end. But I I digress.

But custody is a really nuance question.

Um, because it's not simply about having a custodian or or being on chain. Yeah. The nuance of a margin system is that you actually don't custody your funds. There's no concept of self-custody uh uh in a margin system. So, if you're trading PES, there's no like your keys your your your coin.

Like that's just not true, but it's a lie. Um with a margin system, it's the it's the protocol that controls your funds.

So, you have to have a thorough analysis of what are the security properties of the protocol. Yeah. And the nuance of a margin system is that there's a ton of ways to drain the system that are totally unrelated to the custodian. You could have the best custodian on the planet um uh that's totally secure and never gets hacked and you can still drain the margin system. So you have to look at the protocol through the lens of you know a very comprehensive holistic lens.

The most trivial example of this Yeah.

is to just look at the risk engine. Yeah. Um, and maybe the most notorious example of this is that your FTT collateral weight to one, deposit in uh, you know, FTT in size, borrow USD and withdraw it, and then game over.

Um, and that can happen on a centralized exchange, it can happen on a decentralized exchange, it can happen on a hybrid exchange. And so, you actually have to look at the risk engine, you have to look at the code, and you have to look at how everything's parameterized to actually have confidence in the custody of of an exchange.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Then there's, you know, the second category of of of, you know, which I kind of alluded to risk, right? Where you see this kind of all the time. You saw it with like the Mango hack kind of back early in the days of Salana. You saw it with like, you know, uh uh um recently with um uh uh uh I guess the most notable example is like these pre-markets that get kind of uh manipulated or um uh I guess jelly with hyperlquids like the most recent one. But it happened with every exchange that's uh that you could imagine centralized or decentralized.

Yeah. So you have to have a really robust risk management team that can do all the financial modeling that has all the right price banding um that's actually measuring risk in real time based on the collateral, the assets, the open interest, the positions, the borrows um and be able to manage this thing um at all times. It's kind of like you're riding like a horse or you're riding like a lion with rains and and you need to like make sure that you don't get thrown

off. We got quickly got into the woods like there's just like a lot of uh granularities. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, risk management is the second thing. And then the third thing is just market integrity and fairness. This is something that Trafi has focused just decades on.

There's tons of like rules, regulations, even legislation on market fairness.

Um, and I think this is a really interesting uh topic when you start talking about L2s versus L1's um uh and and the decentralized exchange landscape where you have something like, you know, a centralized sequencer. Yeah. Which might eliminate

uh uh uh for example, vanilla custody.

Yeah. Um, however, that centralized sequencer has a position of privilege

and depending on how you order the transactions, you can steal money by front running the user, causing people to get liquidated, omitting transactions. Um, and so market integrity and fairness is a really important way to analyze these systems as well. Yeah. Where, you know, an L2 a centralized L2 sequencer might get rid of the vanilla custody risk, but it doesn't get rid of this uh a market integrity risk. And so ultimately you have like a trust me analysis through that dimension.

And so there's tons of trade-offs to make

and there and this is why I kind of reject like the whole centralized versus decentralized uh uh framing and it's a very very complex and nuance conversation as these systems are are are operational beasts.

Totally.

And so yeah that's kind of the framework I would I would use for the conversation. I think Amani just kind of introduced a very nuanced framework for us to evaluate the risk of sex versus risk of DEX, right? Because most people I think for people who are just kind of buying and hold or just trade normal things, crypto, you think about centralized exchange versus DEX are more like accessibility, right? Easy UIUX and whatnot. that there's a lot of things behind the scene when you are especially if you're dealing with a large amount of money uh to understand the different risk considerations of sex versus sex and also what's considered as good you know platform I I think the the objective is to build something that's fair transparent right that's always the principle but of course there's trade-offs with those um and I love to hear from Ogo and uh Chris uh what kind of framework when you think about sex versus sex

yeah I mean I think if If we sort of accept the sex versus dex uh framework like you're saying like Armani rejected this which I think is totally fair if we accept it

then I think the easiest way to um to look at this is you have on one hand basically like a vending machine and you have on the other hand like a restaurant like a full service restaurant and so the vending machine is very easy. You walk up, you put your money in, you get out whatever the thing's there. If it screws up, you can't really complain to anybody because there's no one there to fix it. uh but you know you get your qual you get your product it might be a little bit lower quality product than what you could get in a restaurant but nonetheless you get what you're what you're paying for uh at that moment

and then you have a restaurant which is more like a centralized exchange and you have you have you have customer service you have waiters waitresses you have a manager you can complain to you have uh you know that but there's also it's a little bit more hidden what's happening too you make your order and that happens back in the back of the house and it comes out to you and you see you see it there could have could have arsenic in it who really knows um and so so you definitely have uh you definitely have trade-offs and the risk like he was talking about I think that

one of the one of the the the common uh comments people make about decentralized exchanges is well uh you know you don't have you don't have the risk of of um of of basically your money being stolen but you do because you have you have lack of integrity in the market itself. So you have people who bundle launches, you have people who um you know can do rug pulls, things like this. But you also don't necessarily have a lot of security when you go to the centralized exchange either if you're not doing certain security checks because then you have situations like uh Celsius or like FTX, right? So like yeah, the money is there and you can like sort of verify but then they could be screwing you on the backside and you don't really know it.

I think it really comes down to uh in in some ways I I think that Armani's um analysis is correct and I think that I would do this if I was using considerable funds. M

I think it's very difficult to do that analysis if you're playing with 50 bucks or 100 bucks. It's like a lot of work to go through to do that. And so it really comes down to from a user experience point of view. Would you rather use a vending machine that's really fast and gets you out something and maybe it's good, maybe it's not. Or would you rather have something that's a little more curated and uh you know you know has has a little more tailoring to it.

Um

I think that's my answer. I mean with

I think those are all really really good takes, right? Um can hear from Chris because you're building perpetual decks, right? So I I think whether it's from ethos or you know vision you kind of made that choice right? So so how do you think about this? Why did you make the choice of building perpetual decks?

Yeah.

Yeah. Um I think that the good thing about a sex is um it's kind of a vertically integrated wall garden. Kind of what Armani brought up with the um control of funds. Uh the sex is going to handle the security for you. It's going to abstract a lot of that away which can enable a good UX.

is going to run the whole matching engine. It might not be clear with market integrity whether they're counter trading you or what you're doing. But in theory, because a centralized can offer a very convenient UX and really good performance, things that historically dexes have struggled with. So there's definitely a lot of benefits to that vertically integrated type approach. And you see dexes um not actual dexes but under the veil of being a DEX moving in that direction because there is a lot of advantages to the scale and the UX that comes with being more vertically integrated.

I think the benefit on the tech side though and it ultimately comes from being more open and more bottom up and not controlling user funds um is it's more community based. It's easier for customization. Uh it's more permissionless. For example, on drift, there's uh different aggregators that build on top of it. You can spelled up you can spin up a client on top of it.

Um it's much more uh like the bizaar of anyone can come in and build on top of it and and use it how they would like. And I think that leads it to be um more community based.

Yeah.

So historically, if a user uses Coinbase, it's very much like a business. they use it and uh they don't have any ownership or any attachment to it. Whereas with these very successful dexes um people actually participate, own it um care a lot about it.

And just as a developer and builder, I've always been attracted to that more bottomup open

um type ethos. Um and that's why even though sometimes there's more difficulties building a onchain per deck, I think it's ultimately worth it. And I think the the arc of progress is like Salana keeps getting better, these high throughput blockchains keep getting more performant and in the long run those kind of like shortcuts you take to get more performance will get washed out. Um and so that's why I'm motivated to keep building a perex.

So I guess if I were to ask, do you think DAX is going to win in the long run? Uh do do you think both Sex and Dex will actually coexist? Because over the years I think DEX is taking shares right from centralized exchange but of course centralized exchanges are onboarding more and more users into the space as well. Do do you think there will be a co-exist? Do you think Dex is going to dominate in the future?

What what's your take?

I think they can co cohabitate even something like a perex and that has builder codes like Drift just launched. You can build a centralized exchange type interface that controls funds and just routes through a DEX liquidity.

Yeah.

So there uh there's values to both. I think a lot of um a lot of users want the convenience that comes with the sex and the security benefits. Yeah.

And then other users more power users potentially more sophisticated users like institutions want to know how the whole system is working. They needed to be open source and transparent so they know they're not going to get rugged and they might interact more directly with the underlying uh decks without all that extra like handholding.

Yeah.

So I don't think it's necessarily one wins versus the other. I think they both have their place.

Yeah. Agree. I think it's catering to different segment of customers different needs. Right. If I were to think about it assets were created on chain, right?

So if you want to gain access to some of the exotic assets that were new, it's perhaps best to go on chain. Um and then you know once the but then for the general public who doesn't have so much knowledge or doesn't feel comfortable interacting with DEX right then they go on centralized exchanges but of course there are certain risk they have to bear as well. Um maybe I want to take the conversation back to Amani because you guys started off being a wallet a very successful wallets in Salana. Um and then you build the XNFT standards and whatnot. Um and then now you're putting in a lot of resources to build a centralized exchange and getting licenses across uh uh kind of a range of jurisdictions, right?

And that's no mean feat because we all know once it gets to compliance and regulation license a lot of resource has to be thrown under at that. So just kind of wonder understand what's what's driving that strategical decision- making. Why don't you guys stay on chain? Yeah, it's a great question. It begs the question, was it what does it mean to be onchain?

Yeah. Yeah.

I think one of the reasons why I reject the whole sex dex dichotomy

is because my assertion is that

the first principled way to build not only a centralized exchange but any traditional financial institution is in the same way you build the decks. M

and there's one property that you throw away um that does not apply to the centralized exchange context and it's simply censorship resistance but everything else trust minimization verifiability auditability being able to compose with it being able to build clients on top of it you know whether it's builder codes or anything else you can do all of that with a centralized exchange the one ingredient that's different I mean you have a distributed validator data set you can distribute control um uh uh you have all of the same trust minimized properties and to centralize exchange, but you have one difference.

You have a compliance team that imposes censorship because that's the only way for you to follow whatever rules and regulations and laws that exist in all the various countries around the world. And then the question is okay, why do you do this

and and what is like the relationship between a sex index uh when that happens? And the reason to do it in my view is simple. If you want to expand beyond crypto assets, well, you want to do something like, you know, RWAS um or equities is maybe the most salient example, well, then you need to have this compliance function. You have to, this might not sound like sexy or cool or whatever, but this just the truth. You have to KYC.

You have to ensure there's no insider trading. You have to ensure there's no market manipulation. You need surveillance on on on the order book. Um and these are all the rules and requirements if you want to go from, you know, 1 to three trillion of of assets in crypto to you know 100red trillion and beyond um to give access to the larger kind of capital markets that exist in the world. And so this was really important for us to to be able to build this function um so that we could expand beyond crypto and to actually fulfill this dream that I think everybody like loves to um you know work towards which is the convergence of of crypto and traditional finance so that crypto eats all of you know of tradi um and so you know

the reason why we did all this was so that we can get to that kind of stage where we can have crypto we can have equities uh we'd have spot spot margin and borrow lend perpetual futures all cross collateralized cross margin into a single account built on a money market getting yield on everything where I can put in my Apple stock and withdraw dollars. Um and now you're starting to actually start talking about this dream that everybody's been talking about in crypto over the past 10 years of reinventing finance.

Yeah.

Um and a big important part of that is um is the compliance function uh for better or worse. Um and so I view them very harmonious. you know, the wallet is just as important as the exchange for us. It's a single app. We want a single user experience.

We want our users to be able to log in with their exchange account and be able to go, you know, to the borrow, lend on drift, and get yield. Um, but we also want regulated counterparties to do the same thing that digital asset treasuries did for crypto assets to now do it for market structure. Um, you can think of like, you know, regulated centralized exchanges as nothing more than a DAT for markets for crypto markets where you now have like a regulated interface and API for people that can't go and trade in DeFi directly. And there's a lot of these people. Um, I would say the majority of the capital in the world falls into this category.

Um, where they need that interface where they can actually plug in and actually get access to crypto assets and crypto parties, whether it's, you know, fiat rails and every currency in every region around the world. You know, if you want to talk to a bank, the first thing they're going to start asking you is, you know, what does your compliance look like? You want to uh be able to deal with regulated counterparties, right? Pension funds, regulated hedge funds. You know, they have LP agreements that have specific rules and requirements to be able to access, you know, assets, right?

This is why debts even exist in the first place. Otherwise, I would just go create an account on Coinbase and buy my Bitcoin. Like, why wouldn't they do that? Yeah. Um, and so this filling this like hole like hole in the market and playing this role

is ultimately why we went this route because we think that there's not a lot of cryptonative folks that want to bring the best that crypto has to offer and actually apply it to the context of traditional finance and you need to do both uh uh and and and so we hope to play that role and to help kind of the growing like you know uh DeFi ecosystem emerge and to be able to route a lot of those resources and that capital inflows uh and to bring it actually on chain whether it's in our own kind of exchange itself or into Salana Ethereum or beyond.

Got it. So if I understand correctly what you guys are building is actually this hybrid model. So in a way you have centralized exchange very regulated very compliant and you talk about having strong compliance function to make sure it uh can't be evil right and don't be evil and then such that you are able to on board a lot more users that don't want to interact on chain and that flows can come in but uh you also have the defy access through the wallet such that you you kind of have the best of both worlds that's kind of

the one thing I would add is to you know don't be evil or can't be evil it has to be built into the system from an engineering point of view. You have to be able to use it like you have to be able to trust it with like code and math.

Um, and so not only do we have this, you know, compliance function that all TradFy firms have, but we also built the entire exchange as a permissioned blockchain. It's a multiode validator network. There's no single point of control. Every

for the centralized exchange, I didn't know that. Okay, that's interesting.

In a as trust minimized a way as any of the modern dexes. Um uh and it makes sense for our context because if you want to be able to solve these problems whether it's FTX 2008 financial crisis, the 1930s or anything in between, you have to do it at the engineering level and not just rely on on humans to yeah say trust me road.

That's such an important clarification because I I was going to push back and say uh vers come be evil versus don't be evil. I would definitely go for come be evil, right? and and so the the centralized exchange is actually built on distributed system, right? With improved uh transparencies and whatnot.

That's right. You can do comput Yeah. It's a private permission set. We don't have public data. Um but you can do computational and state integrity proofs in real time.

Uh we do proof we we attest to a ledger that you can prove. Uh we publish it at the end of every day and u anybody in the world can verify that their you know balances and portfolios sitting there every single day. Not once a year, not once a quarter, not once a month. It's by far the most trust minimized, you know, regulated financial institution in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. I hope all the centralized exchanges starts to adopt this. Um, and Ogo, love to hear your take on this because you're building American fun, which is more like a launchpad, right?

So, it's very much onchain. Um, but how do you think about this?

Well, America fund starts as a launchpad. That's kind of stage one. Um it's so so I'm I'm an adviser for World Liberty Finance as as I think some people know on the security side. So security I take very seriously and the security of users I take very seriously

and I think that when you have something uh like Pump Fund or something completely permissionless I I like that from an ethos point of view. I came into crypto really early so I like this kind of stuff in general but I also think that uh it's it's ripe for exploitation right and so you have situations where 98% of people who uh who launch something on these on on these launchpads lose

right and so the 2% or 1% who win are generally insiders or they're the launchers themselves right and so I think it's not really like a sustainable model all the way through I think there's a certain amount of uh gamblers who would like that but a lot of people who wouldn't so if you think back if you're old enough which most people here are not but if Think back to America online and the way that it had everything set up. It was one place where you could you could have your email, you could have your chats, you could have your uh your web browsing, but you could also trust and put put rules around that such that your kids can't go and like see things they shouldn't see. Now, if they if they are smart enough or clever enough or motivated enough to go somewhere else, they can go to open internet explorer and see everything they want to see. But inside of the AOL platform, there are guardrails.

And it's the same thing with America. Fund. And that's why the ticker is AOL. sort of an homage. It's like a friendly homage to that.

Um the idea is it's a permissionless launch and anyone can launch whatever they want to, but it does cost a little bit of money to do so. Um there's only one time you can have the same ticker. So there's not going to be 63 different broccoli tickers. It'll be one broccoli ticker and we allocate that. And on the front side is permission.

So the American Fund website itself is permissioned and we decide what goes on there.

Yeah.

And the way we decide that is through a series of of different conversations we have with the developers, the builders, etc. It's not as arduous and complicated as what Armani is doing, which is incredibly difficult where they're talking to regulators. They're they're actually doing things what I would call like the right way. Uh we're not quite doing things the right way. Um but but we're doing things righter

um than than the way that that they're currently done in general. So So yes, that's what Mega Fund uh you know is looking at from that point of view. I I think that our goal is that is that the people out there who want to play games, who want to invest, who want to do DGN things, who want the launch, and they're happy to take some risk, but they don't want to be able to I mean, but they do want to be able to go to sleep at night and not worry about waking up the next day and everything is completely gone from a rug. That's where we're at.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good take. Um Chris, I think I want to touch on one question, right? because hyperlquid launched this hyper core which is uh you know they kind of allow all the front- end uh apps to be uh linked into the their perpetual DAX engine.

So sounds like there are strategies. I'm not going to get licensed, right? But whoever is frontf facing the users kind of like the sex, right? You go and get the license compliance or and channel. Do you think that's a feasible strategy?

Is that something you guys are potentially thinking about or

um I would say Drift already kind of serves as this core D5 primitive for all of Salana.

Yeah.

So there there's tons of apps built on top of Drift already. A lot of the yield aggregators plug into Drift because it's one of the largest borrow lens. Um now with builder codes, people are starting to build new trading clients. Uh there's also vaults built on top of Drift which enable users to get um yield from active managers.

So Drift Vision has always been at this to be this um core DeFi primitive for like much larger Salana DeFi ecosystem.

Um so that's kind of our ecosystem side of the push. And then at the same time uh as a platform you need to bootstrap demand and get usage. So we also have a whole team focus on product to make like a great trading experience from

um just like the very uh vanilla like using a UI to use drift.

So

we kind of spend half our time trying to make great products and then the other half of the time building this like core defi uh primitive for the bigger Salana ecosystem. And yeah, one of the main benefits of being Salana is it's the it's the, you know, the blockchain with the most users and there's so much going on, so many assets.

Yeah.

A lot of our markets are uh Salanacoin. So, it's a very good position to be to be at the center of that larger ecosystem.

Got it. Got it. One last question. I see we only have uh 15 seconds for the panelists. What percentages of your net worth you you feel comfortable putting on bags and and a on centralized exchange or what percentages you feel comfortable holding self-custodial?

I have 0% on centralized exchange.

Okay.

100% of it is either in my own custody or it's on a decentralized situation.

Okay. So still very much trust self-custodian.

I don't have a single dollar that's on a centralized situation. And it's not because uh I don't trust Armani because I completely trust this fellow here. Whenever he builds something that I can like verify in a lot of important ways, then I would put potentially money there. But I don't trust I'm sorry to say I don't trust Coinbase and I and I don't trust Gemini and I don't trust these these people.

It's a principle thing.

It's principle and I think it's practicality. I lost a significant amount of money in FTX

and um and and that was a risk I knew I was taking. I swallowed that risk and I said it was worth the it was it was worth the reward I was getting. Yeah.

I was wrong about that.

Yeah. Right. And so I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. You step in a puddle one time, not two. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel you. I'm also FTX victim.

Exactly.

But still, I have certain amount of net worth on centralized exchange just because there's, you know, trading fees and all this the earn product, right? There's product that's available that's kind of have great UIUX. Um, what about you? A

I'm also a FTX victim. I lost 14 and a half million dollars on FTX, so I can relate to you.

Team panel. Um, look, I mean, I think it's a super nuanced question. Um, you can't give like one answer for a size fit all. There's certainly people that are more afraid of themselves than they are afraid of of of the exchange. Um, I would argue there's not a single margin system on the planet Earth, whether it's a centralized or decentralized exchange, that doesn't ultimately have a multi-IG.

If you look at 99.9999999% of all decentralized exchanges other than maybe like Orca on Salana and Uniswap on Ethereum mainet they all are controlled by multi-IGs which means they're all centralized exchanges at the end of the day from a security point of view.

Um you could have three four people steal all the money like that. Um and so to answer your question, um I don't think you know it's uh uh there's not like a singular answer and it's a super nuance conversation.

Yeah, agree. Um depends on the user's knowledge as well, right? How comfortable you are, how good you are because some people might be I I don't want to operate my own wallets. I might lose you, right? There's nobody I can call.

Yeah, totally. Chris,

I think we're getting kicked off the stage. But, uh, I'm a developer, so I self-custody like 80% of my net worth, probably.

Yeah, makes sense.

It's easier when you can code

when you have the technical chops.

Yeah, I trust the CLI more than I trust most people. So,

awesome. Thank you so much for your insightful sharing. Um, thank you so much. That's the end of the panel.