Disclaimer; All the opinions on this blog are solely at the discretion of the writer. The sources for this research are in the links below and any entities named in this report do not have any affiliation to this content creator. Do not take this as financial advice. DYOR.
The 2024 halving is soon and the market is heating up bringing again, speculation, and opportunism. I was looking for a tool to organize my portfolio which is scattered throughout different networks.
I generally refrain from using CEXs to secure the custodian of the coins, tokens, and NFTs I get. I eventually found CoinStats online. They have a free, and premium version and I went for the free one following the open-source ethos. The free one comes with ads and on one particular day, I saw a banner for Satoshi DEX. Peaked by interest knowing that building a DEX on BTC is difficult, if not impossible in its truest sense, I entered the link driven by curiosity.
The website UI is polished and they have a "whitepaper" which is a jump back to the homepage breaking down their press releases, protocol proposition, security solutions, tokenomics, and roadmap. The curious information was the price of the token on their presale deposit widget. By connecting a browser wallet, one can see how much in tokens denominated USD I'd earn from the airdrop expected around Q2 - Q3 2024. The one I saw was priced at USD 0.016 and it's not the first time ICOs are put up with a price, but this was from an anon team with no access to their product other than a deposit smart contract on GitHub. The account on the Github is only one year old and has only one commit, the deposit contract commit. The Twitter account too is relatively new and the only engagement is their airdrop promotion. I checked on YouTube and watched a promoter breaking down the info laid out on their page, and at the end of the video, the guy says he was sponsored by Satoshi DEX.
I finally went to their Telegram group and found a support team, some regulars, and a bunch of degens trying to gain more info on the project. There was also a bot updating the group every time a deposit was made. The team did a great job setting up shop, fully crafted to make it seem as legitimate as possible, but the nail in the coffin that made this reporter stop from investing was when I saw one specific user active in the telegram group. I like to think artists consciously, or unconsciously always leave a mark on their work and I interpreted one user name by Carlo Ponzi made to look like a retail degen communicating in tandem with the support team as netting a sense of security in the group.
Upon this inference, anyone who uses, follows, or works in the sector knows the difficulty in building a DEX, especially on BTC due to the nature of the code. The project says they work to solve the problem by leveraging the Stacks chain, but go to the STX page and one can find a DEX already in production. Stacks has not made any promotion of this team.
This is not FUD for my sound conclusion is based on available information by anyone with internet access.
P.S. Bisq is already the first BTC DEX.
