DeFi FAQ
Financial services — trading, lending, borrowing, earning interest — delivered by programs running on a blockchain instead of by companies. No account application, no opening hours, and no one who can freeze your funds. The trade-off is that no one can reverse your mistakes either, and the code holding your money may contain bugs.
A DEX settles trades directly between wallets using smart contracts; you keep custody throughout. A centralized exchange holds your assets and matches orders on its own books. Centralized venues generally offer deeper liquidity, faster execution, fiat on-ramps and support when something goes wrong. DEXs offer custody and access to tokens before they are listed anywhere. Most active traders use both, for different jobs.
A pool of two or more tokens that traders swap against, funded by users who deposit into it. Depositors earn a share of trading fees proportional to their contribution. There is no counterparty finding you a price — the pool's formula sets it based on the ratio of assets remaining.
The gap between holding two tokens and depositing them into a liquidity pool. When their prices diverge, the pool automatically rebalances toward the weaker one, leaving you with more of the loser and less of the winner. If prices return to where they started, the loss disappears — hence "impermanent". Often they do not.
Two routes. DEX+ aggregates liquidity from decentralized exchanges across several chains, so you can swap into on-chain tokens from a MEXC account without setting up a wallet or managing gas. On-Chain Earn connects Spot balances to on-chain yield opportunities through the same interface. Both trade some self-custody for convenience.