Decentralized trading exchanges are probably one of the best financial applications of blockchain technology. In recent years, commodity and asset trading exchanges around the world have been susceptible to scams and frauds arising from orderbook manipulation and inflated trading volumes. Additionally, reconciliation and settlement is an expensive and time-consuming affair for most exchanges. Decentralized trading exchanges look to solve both of these issues by replicating the orderbook across the network participants in real time and using a blockchain ledger to settle trades between the traders. The distributed nature of the orderbook means that it cannot be tampered with or modified by an individual or a single party. All trades are posted instantly to the ledger and settled. Exchange participants can validate these trades simply by checking the ledger.

In the next two chapters, we'll be building decentralized trading exchanges of our own. We'll be building an asset exchange platform and a multi-currency exchange platform that uses blockchain technology for securing the trading process.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 8, Building a Decentralized Trading Exchange on Blockchain
• Chapter 9, Developing a Currency Trading Exchange for Market Making
• Chapter 10, Looking into the Future