Chronos becomes 8th largest DEX

Seven days after its inauguration on the Arbitrum blockchain, decentralized exchange (DEX) Chronos reached a new milestone on May 4, exceeding $217 million in total value locked (TVL) at the time of writing.

According to DefiLlama, with the new TVL figures, Chronos ranks eight among the largest decentralized exchanges. TVL represents the funds held or staked in a protocol in DeFi.

The TVL milestone was reached during the first hours of the day following the launch of Epoch 1, which facilitated the emission of Chronos (CHR) tokens to liquidity pools.

The beginning of Epoch 1 permitted investors to begin collecting rewards.

Chronos debuted on April 27 to serve as a liquidity provider and automated market maker for the Arbitrum network, hosting core pools such as Chronos-Ether (CHR/ETH) and Chronos-USD Coin (CHR/USDC), both seeded with 2 million CHR tokens, along with Arbitrum-Ether (ARB/ETH), Ether-USD Coin (ETH/USDC), USD Coin-Tether (USDC/USDT), and Wrapped Bitcoin-Ether (WBTC/ETH) pools.

Decentralized exchanges are central to DeFi and are exhibiting evidence of growth and maturity following the crypto winter of 2022.

After the insolvency of FTX, the industry realized the true value of DEXs. Charles Wayn, the co-founder of Web3 community platform Galxe, remarked that DEXs and wallets will be the pillars of gaming adoption in the future, citing the importance of DEXs’ decentralization.

Similarly, Maverick Protocol’s chief technology officer, Bob Baxley, said that the past year served as a proof-of-concept for DEXs and DeFi.

“After all, if you look at some major DEXs, on some days they’re doing more volume than Coinbase,” he said, noting that the restrictive regulatory environment in the U.S. is likely to benefit DEXs:

“If centralized on-ramps into the crypto ecosystem continue to get cut off in places like the United States, then we could see more and more people turning to DEXs for performing their trading.”

DEXs are peer-to-peer marketplaces where crypto merchants can engage in transactions without transferring funds to intermediaries or custodians.

These self-executing transactions are powered by smart contracts. However, as we have observed over the past few years, hacks and flaws are among the most significant dangers associated with transacting on DEXs.

Brent Xu, the founder of the Web3 bond-market platform Umee, stated, “I suspect volumes for a wide variety of DEXs will eventually grow exponentially, especially as underlying blockchains like Ethereum continue to scale and offer more throughput for lower gas prices.”