DEXs Are Dominating Crypto Trading in Asia, and CEXs Are Scrambling to Keep Up

When it comes to trading memecoins, time is money — and waiting on a centralized exchange (CEX) could cost you both.

When it comes to trading memecoins, time is crucial, and waiting on a centralized exchange (CEX) could cost you both time and money.

For instance, let's consider the recent launch of $TRUMP memecoin on January 17, 2025. Just before his inauguration, Donald Trump unveiled his memecoin on Solana, which surged past a $14.5 billion peak market cap on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Raydium and Orca within little more than 24 hours, making it the second largest memecoin behind Dogecoin at one point.

However, by the time the major CEXs listed $TRUMP a day or two later — having cleared the usual bureaucratic rigmarole — the action was over. As such, for speculators, DEXs aren’t just faster; they're more liquid, more volatile and frankly, more fun. In a market where fortunes are made in minutes if not milliseconds, waiting for a CEX to catch up is a missed opportunity.

On the Monday morning following $TRUMP memecoin mania, I spoke with Bobby Ong, co-founder of CoinGecko, the independent crypto data aggregator that has long been my personal go-to for checking token prices — along with roughly 40 million other monthly visitors, according to HypeStat.com. Founded in 2014, CoinGecko has grown into one the most trusted sources for crypto market data.

Ong and I had actually scheduled the call before Christmas, so it was pure coincidence that Trump just happened to launch his memecoin a few days earlier. When we spoke, we both had the same reaction: What the hell just happened?

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I’ve known Bobby for years—he's a true OG, having first bought bitcoin in 2013, and is one of the sharpest observers of how trading habits evolve at the grassroots level. When he started CoinGecko, it was to solve his own problem — back then, crypto price tracking was rudimentary, and there wasn’t a way to analyze market depth, liquidity, developer activity or community engagement. He wanted better insights, so he and his co-founder built the tool themselves.

Ong is based in Malaysia, while I’m in the Philippines, so we've both spent years in Asia's crypto scene, watching firsthand how the region has shaped — and been shaped by — crypto. With Consensus Hong Kong coming up and both of us slated to be speakers, we planned to discuss crypto adoption trends in Asia. But we ended up talking about the problems with CEX.

DEX appeal

For CEX users, waking up on Monday was a brutal realization: they'd already missed out on nearly 41,000% in potential gains. This was particularly gut wrenching since it wasn't just another obscure memecoin popping off in some niche corner of the internet; it was a headline-dominating asset tied to the newly re-elected U.S. president, and still, CEXs couldn't move fast enough.

Meanwhile, in just 72 hours, Solana's DEX users recorded an unprecedented $28 billion in trading volume, largely driven by $TRUMP and the fast-following $MELANIA token. This level of DeFi engagement was unimaginable barely a few years ago, when DEXs were considered too complex for the average trader to use. But that's no longer the case, which suggests that DeFi isn't just an alternative to CEXs; it might just overtake them.

“The experience with decentralized exchanges is superior compared to centralized exchanges, and people gravitate to that — that's what I'm seeing in the market right now,” Ong told me.

How times have changed

Back in 2020, CoinGecko's Yearly Crypto Report showed that while combined CEX and DEX trading volumes surged by $403 billion to $534 billion, CEXs accounted for 93% of that growth. Fast-forward to 2024 and that same annual report revealed that the top 10 spot DEXs had done $1.76 trillion in volume all on their own. Additionally, in Q4 of 2024, Solana overtook Ethereum for the first time as the dominant chain, reaching $219.2 billion in DEX trading volume, or over 30% of all DEX trades, compared to Ethereum's $184.3 billion.

Particularly with Solana, the ecosystem has been built with a strong emphasis on mobile applications. Wallets like Phantom and Jupiter are designed to be user-friendly for mobile trading, which is critical since