How OBOL rates decentralised exchanges
A DEX cannot lose your coins the way a custodian can, but it can lose them in ways a custodian cannot: an unaudited upgrade, a compromised front end, a malicious router approval. So our rubric leads with security record, then execution quality, because a venue that quotes a good price and fills you badly is not cheap.
Decentralisation is scored on what the contracts actually allow. Who can upgrade them, how quickly, and with whose consent? A protocol whose multisig can swap out the router tomorrow is a different risk from one whose core is immutable, regardless of the marketing.
Cost is more than the swap fee
The advertised 0.3% is rarely what a trade costs. Price impact on the size you are actually trading, gas on the chain you are using, and MEV extracted between quote and settlement all belong in the number. We score the realistic all-in cost for a mid-size retail order, not the best case on a deep pair.
What we cannot verify
Audit reports tell you what a firm looked at in a fixed window, not that code is safe. Reported volume can be inflated by wash trading and incentive farming. Where we rely on third-party dashboards we say so in the review, and we discount volume that exists only while emissions are running.