speak with Lucas Huang, the Head of Growth at Tokenlon, a popular decentralized exchange (DEX).

My background is in management and machine learning. Before entering the crypto space, I worked for a tech startup and a knowledge consulting firm where we helped technology transformations for our clients in the public sector.

The Tokenlon team was initially part of imToken wallet team, imToken is the largest crypto wallet in Asia with over 10 million devices. We believe the goal of a decentralized wallet should be to provide as many value-added services to users as possible, but at the same time allow users to maintain self-custody of their assets.

Without doubt, token exchange is the most requested feature from imToken users. So we conducted extensive research in 2017 and started development in 2018. As we grew our user base and channels, we spun off from imToken and became a decentralized exchange protocol that can be integrated in any applications.

The team is actually quite decentralized with people from different continents, but we do have a headquarters in Singapore. Singapore is one of the most crypto-friendly countries in the world. There are many crypto projects based there and crypto-related regulation/information is much clearer compared to other countries in Asia.

Like I mentioned, there is a pretty vibrant crypto community in Singapore and regulation is friendly. You have a higher chance to find a regulatory framework or information that is relevant to the business you do in crypto.

Regarding the cons, it may be harder to hire local developers compared to other countries. Unlike Silicon Valley in the US or Beijing in China, Singapore has only started to become attractive to developers in recent years. But luckily in crypto, we have a very friendly remote working culture, our developers are working remotely from different countries and we are happy about it.

Great question! Our growth this year has been very encouraging. Since the launch of Tokenlon 4.0 version in April 2019, we have helped more than 130k users (addresses) to exchange over $4.6 billion in volume. We know that DeFi users (addresses) just broke 1 million a few weeks ago, that means Tokenlon is serving more than 10% of users to the space.

As Tokenlon is a decentralized exchange, all transactions are recorded online. You can check out this dashboard on Dune Analytics for more details.

Since the latest update, Tokenlon automatically finds the best rate out of three different liquidity sources: The professional market makers, Uniswap and 0x.

The market makers have been a key feature of Tokenlon since 2018. Unlike other orderbook or AMM exchanges, the market makers will provide fixed prices for your trade. This so called RFQ (Request-for-Quote) trading system therefore shows the user the best trade rate, before the trade happens, unlike all other exchange types.

First, proven and innovative, we are now happy with the system, as it is mainly responsible for our growth.

We do provide additional features such as free trades for new users and a one-click user experience, all of which aim to take away the small pain points that decentralized trading usually has.

We just released our third major update to the DEX, Tokenlon 5.0, adding the individual functions mentioned earlier.

With 0x and Uniswap already integrated, we will be able to add a lot more tokens to Tokenlon, while our users can get the guaranteed best rate without having to worry about which DEX to use.

On top, we just released our LON token.

We just released Tokenlon's LON token, which will eventually help our users to govern the DEX protocol.

As for today, LON gives trading fee discounts to our users and is issued via liquidity mining. On top, we rewarded our early users who traded and used the platform.

This way we already achieved a broad and fair distribution of LON to our users.

The significant challenge is acquiring users. Tokens are plenty and also professionals willing to trade. But users have lots of choices already today.

This doesn't need to be a bad thing for the space though. The more competition, the more innovation, the protocols need to achieve. I believe our trading volumes show that we did quite a great job so far, but we won't rest but try to work with user feedback to keep innovating.

Speaking about DEXs, Uniswap is interesting. Maybe AMMs in general, as some professionals from the traditional finance space seem to be unable to wrap their heads around the success of the trading strategy. Personally, I believe we will see AMMs and other very important trading venues building the backbone of what is to become the multi-chain DEX space. With our market makers and the aggregation features we play in both worlds.

In general, I'd say DeFi is exciting. Not only what we have seen this summer, like liquidity mining, hostile protocol takeovers and governance tokens. But there is still so much to come. $14 billion in tokens are locked in DeFi smart contracts, which is only a tiny little bit of what traditional companies, let alone financial markets handle. I'm positive we won't be tired of DeFi any time soon.

If I had to guess, I'd say there will be more synthetic assets. Already today, we see a couple of players in that asset segment of the DeFi space. But the products seem to be still searching for the real breakthrough.

Regulations won't become less, but rather more prevalent. There will be some major steps taken by the US regulators to adapt legal frameworks around blockchains and tokens.

Regulation as well. If you look at institutional players in the market. Some of them already entered cryptocurrency positions. But many of them need to have clearer legal frameworks.

And on the DeFi side, we need more research, more willingness to innovate. Users will have a hard time using the applications, and developers will have to improve in a never ending race toward mass adoption. Because, let's be honest, crypto is still difficult to use if you are not an expert.

Crypto - meaning of the technology - will be used by many people, but it will just be as boring as HTTP and other technologies that nobody really cares about today. Still, those technologies are holding up the very fabric of our society today.