The past couple of years has seen decentralized finance (DeFi) maintain a meteoric rise. Such an impressive growth can only mean one thing—a rise in decentralized exchanges as well. With centralized exchanges proving a little complicated and problematic at times, the crypto space will agree that decentralized exchanges are the future of cryptocurrency trading on Layer 1 Ethereum. While these decentralized solutions are great and have caused a rise in DeFi activities, users have had to contend with paying miners higher transaction/gas fees. But these solutions don’t have to be expensive and there are some great exchanges keeping things economical. Here are some of the cheapest DEXes to trade on layer 1 Ethereum. #1. Balancer Balancer launched in 2020 as an Automated Market Maker allowing DEXes to function more efficiently in the DeFi space. One of Balancer’s aims has been reducing gas fees for traders on Ethereum and making liquidity pools relatively gas-efficient for new smart contracts. The protocol has set out to make loads of features solid but streamlined. Balancer has recently integrated with blockchain network Gnosis, creating the Balancer-Gnosis protocol (BGP). Their joint work culminated with the launch of CowSwap DEX, which has users needing only to pay a fraction of the gas fees other traders pay to use other DEXes. The gasless option however only functions for ERC-20 tokens. #2. Uniswap Uniswap is seen as the benchm...
