Glossary

DEX

Decentralized Exchange — a smart-contract trading venue, no central order book or custodian.

A decentralized exchange executes trades against liquidity pools or decentralized order books, with no intermediary holding user funds. Jupiter, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and Raydium are examples. For meme-coin traders, DEXes are where new tokens actually trade, often with very low liquidity in the first hours. Trading on DEXes requires understanding slippage, routing, and MEV in ways that centralized exchanges hide.

Related terms

AMMAutomated Market Maker — a smart-contract pricing function that quotes prices from a liquidity pool.
Liquidity poolA smart-contract-held reserve of two tokens that traders swap against on a decentralized exchange.
MEVMaximum Extractable Value — profit that can be captured by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions in a block.