Trendspotting: The Rise of DEXs

MoonVentures Analysis by Abhay Mavalankar
September 2025

For more than a decade, centralized exchanges (CEXs) were the unquestioned hubs of crypto trading. They offered deep liquidity, familiar interfaces, and the speed professional traders demanded. But beneath the surface, a slow structural shift has been underway.

In the past two years, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) have not only closed the gap but are now rewriting the rules of crypto markets.

The data shows a clear picture: CEX dominance is fading, while DEX volumes are rising at an exponential pace.

DEXs aren’t just catching up — they’re carving out new lanes of liquidity, creating their own gravity, and setting up the conditions for on-chain markets to become the default

DEXs Are No Longer Edge Bets — A Ratio That Tells the Whole Story

The clearest way to see the shift is through the DEX-to-CEX spot volume ratio.

For a decade it barely moved. DEXs scraped single digits while CEXs towered above. But in late 2023, the curve bent upward, and it hasn’t stopped since.

By mid-2025, DEXs consistently clear more than 30% of CEX spot volumes.

Think of it as a tide rising against the seawall. Every month, more volume seeps on-chain. And once water finds cracks, it doesn’t recede — it pours through.

In Q2 2025, DEX spot trading jumped ~25% quarter-over-quarter, while CEX spot activity fell by ~28%. The result: the ratio didn’t just rise — it spiked.

Stablecoin Swaps: The FX Corridors of Crypto

If DEXs are the new highways of crypto, stablecoin swaps are the FX corridors that carry the bulk of traffic.

Monthly swap volumes have surged from just over $10B in early 2023 to $70–80B per month today, with cumulative flows already breaking into the trillion-dollar range.

Chart: Stablecoin Swap Spot Volume by Pair

The USDC–USDT pair dominates this market. It’s the dollar-to-dollar corridor of crypto — the equivalent of EUR/USD in global FX.

Secondary routes like DAI–USDC or FRAX–USDC are growing, but they’re feeder roads compared to the main highway.

These swaps aren’t speculative bursts — they’re structural. Traders rebalance, hedge, and move collateral through these pairs. In traditional terms, DEXs are now the FX desks of crypto, handling flows that underpin every other market.

Native Stable Pairs: Where Price Discovery Now Lives

Beyond stable-to-stable, native asset to stablecoin pairs are the next battleground. These pairs are where ecosystems anchor their value, and where price discovery increasingly happens.

ETH–USDC is steadily gaining ground on ETH–USDT, while SOL–USDC has risen from almost nothing to a meaningful share of all activity.

The “Other” bucket is shrinking, signaling consolidation around a few standardized, high-trust pairs. Price discovery is no longer concentrated solely in ETH/USDT pairs on CEXs. Instead, it's multi-chain, multi-venue — a development with real implications for risk management, collateral frameworks, and liquidity routing.

Once upon a time, price discovery lived almost exclusively on CEX order books. Now, it’s happening on-chain, across multiple venues, in real time.

Retail Has Arrived: Billions of Trades Every Month

The growth of DEXs isn’t just whales moving size — it’s retail scale. DEXs now see ~12B trades per month, up from under a billion just two years ago. The majority are sub-$100 swaps, while very large trades (> $10k) are shrinking as a share.

This isn't the Wall Street model of a few players clearing huge size. It's millions of small trades firing off constantly. CEXs look like the old exchange floors; DEXs look like retail investing at internet scale — fast, fragmented, everywhere.

A Layered Market: From Memes to Utility

Looking at DEX spot activity by category, the stack reveals a layered market.

• Memecoins form the constant hum of activity, drawing attention and liquidity into the system.
• Stablecoin swaps and native-stable pairs provide the throughput, delivering recurring, utility-driven volume.
• Around these pillars, new verticals are rising: tokenized assets, liquid staking derivatives, AI-linked tokens, and composite baskets.

The picture isn’t one-dimensional speculation — it’s an expanding stack where memes fuel attention while stablecoins carry structural flows.

The annualized run rate for DEX spot activity has moved into the multi-trillion dollar range. What once looked like pure speculation now looks like an economy with multiple layers of liquidity.

Liquidity Corridors: Flow Finds Its Natural Homes

One of the strongest truths revealed by flow data is this: liquidity finds a home and sticks. Liquidity doesn’t spread evenly — it clusters.

These aren't random corridors — they embed fee structures, routing efficiency, and community gravity.

Once a chain–DEX combo owns a lane, it’s hard to dislodge without drastic advantage. For example, PancakeSwap alone handled $325B of volume in Q2 2025, nearly half of all DEX activity. These aren't experiments anymore — they're entrenched hubs.

Protocol Tokens and the Usage Loop

Protocol tokens — from DEX governance coins to lending and staking tokens — are seeing rising turnover.

This is the usage loop in action: as protocols grow in activity, their tokens grow in liquidity. Arbitrage between CEXs and DEXs reinforces this loop, with bots extracting hundreds of millions by playing spreads. Instead of weakening DEXs, this keeps liquidity cycling back on-chain.

Governance, lending, staking, derivatives — as usage compounds, so does turnover in the tokens tied to those systems. DEXs become the marketplace of protocol utility, nad arbitrage between CEXs and DEXs is itself a measurable revenue source. Over a 19-month window, estimated CEX–DEX arbitrage value was >$230M, meaning capital is continuously being pulled toward efficient liquidity on-chain.

Why the Tide Is Turning Against CEXs

The cracks aren’t ideological. They’re structural:

Put simply, DEXs no longer trade on ideology — they compete on execution, efficiency, and user experience. With that, DEXs crossing 30% share is not the finish line — it's a launching pad toward 40-50%+ in the next 12-18 months.

For builders, aggregators, and liquidity providers, this is a generational shift. Aggregators that stitch fragmented venues togehter will earn on every routed trade. Market-makers who own stablecoin corridors will capture recurring yield. And teams that perfect retail UX will win the fastest-growing slice of the market.

CEXs won’t disappear, but the center of gravity has shifted. DEXs are no longer fringe experiments — they’re becoming the infrastructure layer of crypto. The tide isn’t just rising; it’s remapping the shoreline.

Abhay Mavalankar serves as SVP of Strategy and Investments at MoonPay, where he leads MoonVentures. MoonVentures encompasses MoonPay’s corporate investment arm as well as MoonPay Labs, the company’s accelerator program dedicated to nurturing entrepreneurial talent and innovation across the crypto ecosystem.