Earlier we wrote about the importance of the revenue from transaction fees that blockchains and Defi apps bring in. It is an important measure of how popular and therefore valuable an app is. We now take a look at how things work behind the scenes at the big (blue chip) dexes: the largest decentralized exchanges.

We'll build on the list of high-scoring chains and apps. What have they done in terms of continued development over the past months? We focus on three decentralized exchanges (dexes): Uniswap, Curve and Sushi.

Uniswap: extending its dominance

For a short time in June, Uniswap (UNI) was the leader in terms of total transaction fees. Right now, Ethereum is back up significantly. But it is a testament to Uniswap's huge market leadership as a dex. Trading volume for the second quarter of 2022 was $47 billion!

In terms of governance, there are also some things brewing. For example, there was a large majority vote in favor of turning on the fee switch, as a pilot. This will ensure that part of the trading fees can become available for the treasury of the protocol. And those funds can then be used to fund innovation.

Innovation such as trading NFTs on Uniswap through the purchase of NFT marketplace Genie. There are also plans to integrate with marketplace Sudoswap.

Curve: working on its own stablecoin

Curve (CRV) saw its Total Value Locked fall hard in 2022: from 15 billion in January to 4 billion now. The fall of UST had to do with that: Curve had large stablecoin pools to exchange UST for other stablecoins. The value of UST dropped almost to zero. Another bad luck moment was the recent hack, which cost over half a million. Most of the lost funds have since been recovered.

Meanwhile, Curve continues to build new products. For example, Curve is working on its own stablecoin. One that has more than one-to-one collateral, making a fall like that UST (which didn't have enough collateral) a lot less likely.

Since there is talk that the collateral of the stablecoins will be partly CRV, this might in the future drive up the price of CRV: that CRV will be removed from circulation when it becomes collateral. Already, the total amount of CRV locked up has grown to 41% of the total amount in circulation. Recently, the issuance of new CRV tokens was reduced by 15%, as per protocol. Also good for the price.

Sushi: cross-chain trading platform

Sushi has not been twiddling its thumbs either. The dex that notoriously forked from Uniswap in 2020, has been busy working on a cross-chain automated market maker (AMM). Stargate is being used as a bridge for this purpose. Another innovation was MEV-protected trading with SushiGuard. This is an option that allows non-insider trades to be made less lucrative by bots. In addition, an Initial Dex Offering platform was launched: MISO 2.0. This makes raising funds for a new coin widely accessible.

Conclusion

The competition in the world of dexes is cut-throat and innovation is moving fast. Uniswap, Curve and Sushiswap all demonstrate this. Also, they are all protocols that are in the top 20 chains/apps in terms of transaction fees. This tells us that, despite the bear market, they are still being used fervently.