Are Odds Increasing or Decreasing for Obtaining a Completely Decentralized Crypto Marketplace?

When the whole concept of Bitcoin came into the industry ten years ago, the world believed that Satoshi held a victory that Cypherpunks could not claim, making an opportunity for decentralization. The goal was to reduce the interactions with centralization and censorship, focusing on the financial freedom afforded by decentralization.

Bitcoin made it possible to create a new community with ideas like Satoshi’s, but the idea that decentralization could truly exist throughout the community predominantly depends on answering a single question – is the community still holding onto the original values.

In a recent article from AMB Crypto, the publication broke down several circumstances that challenge this question, wondering if decentralization could even be spread through the industry anymore. Binance is a perfect example, considering that they recently delisted the Bitcoin SV token from their exchange.

The reasoning behind the delisting appears to have everything to do with the personal actions of Craig Wright, who issued a bounty to discover the identity of someone who called him a fraud. At the time, he warned Wright to stop what he was doing, threatening to delist before following through.

Craig Wright is not Satoshi.

Anymore of this sh!t, we delist! https://t.co/hrnt3fDACq

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) April 12, 2019

Binance is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, and his actions has influenced the actions of lesser exchanges in the name of anonymity. Some of the exchanges to follow suit include Shapeshift, Kraken, BitForex, Bitrue, and Bittylicious. Even though there is no doubt that the actions taken by Wright have not been positive, some of the community questions how necessary it was to delist BSV as a result.

Sure, the community hopes for it, but it does not hold true to the decentralization of cryptocurrency, considering that it is no different that the censorship imposed by banks and financial institutions.

BitMEX is another exchange to have influenced these issues. Not long ago, the company was under fire for potentially trading against their own customers. BitMEX has a lot to do with the liquidity of Bitcoin, which makes the rumors very worrisome.

A blog from Hasu, titled “A storm is brewing over the largest Bitcoin exchange,” explains exactly what could be going wrong at BitMEX, saying that the platform ultimately hid the market making that it participates in.

Even though the blog said that BitMEX admits that their trading desk is “a for-profit operation” that says that the profit is outside of trading. Ultimately, the desk aims to “be breakeven,” as the blog adds that the company claims to only have profit from the service fees paid to them.

However, BitMEX has continually denied external audits, and has refused to give any kind of privileged information to the desk.

The launch of the public “Binance Chain” mainnet has become another source of contention for the market as well. The mainnet, which promises to be a public and decentralized exchange. The Binance DEX will be supported and powered by “Binance Chain.” However, a developer on the project said that the source code for both of these projects has yet to be made available.

If anyone’s wondering, the source code for “Binance Chain” full nodes is still nowhere to be found; 4 days before “mainnet” launch, and after multiple “projects” promised to migrate from Ethereum. Without ever seeing the source code.https://t.co/MuiRN23eDS

— UDI WERTHEIMER (@UDIWERTHEIMER) April 19, 2019

To add to the case here, Larry Cermark from the online publication The Block commented on Twitter about the way that Binance had recently changed the whitepaper on their exchange.

Now, a clause regarding the decision to use 20% of the profits to purchase BNB back for the company is missing.

Subtle change but Binance quietly changed their whitepaper to remove the clause about the firm using 20% of its profits to buy back BNB. https://t.co/f2W3DcdGx0 pic.twitter.com/qAfj2Ilmh9

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) April 18, 2019

At this point, the term “decentralization” is thrown around a lot in the crypto industry, but the efforts that other cryptocurrencies have put in is hardly supportive of this idea.

Centralization continues to be prevalent, against all intention of the original Bitcoin whitepaper. The idea of a currency being free of authority is a dream, but these incidents have made it difficult to prove that it is a concept that other exchanges are actually striving for.