Melonport's Co-Founder Is Joining the Decentralized Crypto Exchange Race

Announced today, Reto Trinkler has opened the new DEX, dubbed Agora Trade, in Malta - a nation that has become increasingly crypto-friendly with the passing of several pieces of legislation around the tech.

Trinkler is best known in the industry for his work at Melonport, the crypto asset management platform he started in 2016 with Goldman Sachs veteran Mona El Isa.

The new venture joins an increasingly crowded field of DEXs, which employ a variety of models but generally seek to address a longstanding problem with traditional, centralized crypto exchanges by allowing traders to control the custody of their assets.

Trinkler hopes these features, combined with the security and autonomy of self-custody, will attract more critical mass than the trickle of trades most DEXs have seen to date.

"For a user, it could happen that they think they matched a trade while in reality, someone else matched the trade and their database was just not synched fully."

Also showing Trinkler's decentralist bent, Agora is deployed on the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer distributed file system, which he said is a more secure way to handle crypto keys than normal web applications.

To make cross-chain trades faster and easier, Agora plans to integrate with Polkadot, the blockchain interoperability protocol, to which Trinkler contributed in his role as a council member and advisor to the Web3 Foundation.

Interestingly, Trinkler's reason for registering Agora in Malta is not just the crypto-friendly political climate, but the community it has attracted: major crypto exchanges such as Kraken, Binance and ZB recently opened offices on the island.

"Having proximity to some of the largest crypto exchanges helps with pooling liquidity for the dark pool," Trinkler told CoinDesk.

As for his previous claim to fame, Trinkler would not say why he left Melonport in June of this year but said that project is in good hands.