ShapeShift to become a decentralised exchange

Cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift is making the necessary moves to become a decentralised exchange (DEX) and will airdrop FOX tokens to one million customers.

ShapeShift announced yesterday that it is working on becoming a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange. The company announced this in a blog post, stating that its entire codebase and technology will become open-sourced in a few months.

The exchange wrote, “To align with the ethos of decentralised finance, ShapeShift, founded in 2014, has begun dissolving our corporate structure, evolving into a community-owned and governed crypto platform. Our entire codebase and technology shall be open-sourced in the coming months. These changes are designed to bring ShapeShift further in line with the true vision of immutable, decentralised finance.”

ShapeShift is hopeful that the transition from a centralised to a decentralised exchange will allow them to build a powerful community centred on an open-source, self-custody, multi-chain cryptocurrency platform for the world.

The cryptocurrency exchange stated that it has become clear to them that decentralisation is the only way to achieve borderless, immutable finance. Hence, decentralising ShapeShift is how ShapeShift chooses to maintain fidelity to the principles initially established by Satoshi and the Bitcoin whitepaper.

ShapeShift revealed that it would also airdrop its FOX tokens to one million users. Governance of the crypto exchange will be handed over to the FOX token holders once ShapeShift becomes a DEX.

“FOX holders will eventually govern all important decisions of the project. This includes governing the ShapeShift DAO—a new DAO treasury endowed with over 240,000,000 FOX Tokens (24% of all FOX),” the exchange added.

The move to completely become a decentralised exchange is a surprising one from ShapeShift. Other leading cryptocurrencies such as Binance developed new decentralised exchanges (like the Binance DEX) and operate them alongside the centralised exchanges. Regardless, ShapeShift’s transition into a DEX would be an interesting development for the cryptocurrency space.