OKX, one of the top crypto exchanges, has recently released an exclusive report concerning the progress of decentralized exchanges during 2024. As per OKX’s “The State of DEXs 2025 Report,” the year 2024 saw a pivotal role of DEXs in the wider crypto ecosystem irrespective of the regulatory headwinds. The top developments of 2024 include Ethereum 2.0’s advancement, the growth in decentralized derivatives, and Solana’s substantial ascent in Web3.
The respective landmarks significantly contributed to boosting user-centeredness and accessibility in decentralized finance (DeFi). While commenting on this report, Jason Lau, the Chief Innovation Officer of OKX, reaffirmed the leading crypto player’s commitment to enhancing innovation by providing developers with resources to guarantee an unparalleled transition to a decentralized future.
Solana vs. Ethereum 2.0: The DEX Showdown Shows that $SOL Outperforms $ETH
OKX revealed in its “The State of DEXs 2025 Report” that despite the significant regulatory challenges, the blockchain and DeFi landscapes saw huge evolution during 2024. In this respect, Ethereum 2.0’s remarkable upgrade and Solana’s extraordinary progress to take a leading position emerged as top events.
Solana ($SOL) has been proven to be a strong competitor of Ethereum ($ETH) by accounting for almost 50% of the market with its notable DEX “Raydium” and efficient aggregator Jupiter. As a result of this, it is focusing on offering the latest models for liquidity provision. While responding to this, Ethereum has also unveiled a unique scalability roadmap going by Ethereum 2.0. With this, it provides a relatively efficient, cost-effective, and streamlined consumer experience.
Ethereum ($ETH) Faces Challenges Concerning Liquidity Provision
Despite the unmatched progress of Ethereum with Ethereum 2.0, it still faces substantial challenges concerning liquidity provision across L2 solutions. Ethereum introduced this proof-of-stake model and implemented proto-dank sharding to tackle the issue of decreased transition throughput and heightened gas fees. Even then, the high amount of liquidity makes decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Ethereum less efficient while another challenge is liquidity fragmentation.
In the case of liquidity fragmentation, the derivatives exchanges face difficulties in getting deposits on their respective platforms. Thus, they require supporting several chain onramps along with managing diverse bridged or wrapped assets. Moreover, the defusion of appchains increases it. Keeping this in view, combined liquidity pools for the aggregation of cross-chain liquidity, such as dYdX, can solve this issue. They eliminate the requirement for DEXs to handle fragmented liquidity.
Derivatives Markets Show Exponential Potential with Innovations and Efficiency in 2024
During 2024, the DeFi derivatives also took a noteworthy position in the market during the previous year. Following dominating the spot sector in traditional finance, derivatives markets are now also impacting the crypto world. Particularly, the trading volume of Bitcoin has reportedly overshadowed the spot volume with a 0.10-0.05 ratio. They made this enormous progress due to their provision of leveraged exposure, effective capital deployment, and effective hedging mechanisms.
dYdX reportedly took the leading position by leveraging cutting-edge infrastructure to enhance scaling endeavors. It keenly focused on risk management, real-time oracle feeds, and efficient chain working. While attempting to outcompete CEXs the top derivative projects like Hyperliquid and others intend to revolutionize the overall market with new features and advancements. The aforementioned derivatives DEXs deliver effective tools for risk management to facilitate developers.
The migration of dYdX to an appchain via the Cosmos SDK as well as the custom-built L1 blockchain of Hyperliquid addresses risk management and liquidity fragmentation. Apart from that, Hyperperps of Hyperliquid along with GMX v2 allow the trading of derivatives on long-tail assets parallel to guaranteeing effective capital deployment. Furthermore, cross-chain solutions and combined liquidity pools, like aggLayer of Polygon, are also contributing to the mitigation of fragmentation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Emerges as Another Frontier in DeFi Growth
Simultaneously, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also getting immense attention within the crypto ecosystems. The integration of unique and advanced AI mechanisms, AI agents, and AI-driven memecoins is a prominent example in this respect. Particularly, Terminals of Truths operates as an AI agent that can interact on-chain via Twitter.
Another notable instance is the Virtuals platform which enables the deployment of AI agents in a permissionless way. Additionally, the AI-driven memecoins, which AI agents deploy, are also recording a surprising upsurge. Thus, the utilization of large-language models like ChatGPT by AI agents shows the potential of revolutionizing the crypto sector. Moving on, DePIN protocols are also leveraging AI technology to incentivize users.
Bittensor serves as a network comprising machine learning models that use blockchain technology to monetize the sharing and training of machine learning models. These innovations, combined with crypto technology, could redefine the overall market dynamics with advanced analytics and automation opportunities.
OKX Reiterates Commitment to Incentivize Developers and Consumers with Cutting-Edge Tools
According to OKX, “The State of DEXs” offers Highlights the massive potential of the DEX realm for growth during 2025. It solidifies the perspective by exploring the unbeatable advancement of this sector during 2024. The prominent events in this respect include Solana’s impressive rise and the exponential development in the derivatives. The report also discloses the persistent challenges of regulatory scrutiny, liquidity fragmentation, and a race with centralized exchanges.
Concurrently, the AI sector’s growing integration into the crypto ecosystem also played a vital role in the overall DeFi expansion. In line with this, the DEX world is poised to provide an unparalleled decentralization, user experience, and scalability. While contributing to this, OKX doubles down on its endeavors to empower developers and users by fostering innovation with cutting-edge tools. The integration of the DEX aggregator into the OKX Web3 Wallet and its accessibility via the DEX API is a chief example in this regard.
