You all have read that you'd better not hold your cryptos on centralized exchanges like Binance or KuCoin

You all have read that you'd better not hold your cryptos on centralized exchanges like BINANCE or KuCoin. However, you like trading, and you are wondering how to trade on decentralized exchanges. I have tested some of them and will share my experience. We will start with Ethereum & L2s.

What are the best Ethereum & L2s chains?

If you have more than 100k$ of cryptos, it might be worth using directly Ethereum (ETH) mainnet. Below that amount, you can use layer-2 (L2) chains, which are cheaper and faster. Among them, you can for instance use Arbitrum, Optimism or ZKSync. You can find the lowest gas fees on l2fees.info:

Although Metis, Loopring and ZKSync look all promising (particularly ZKSync, since using them could make you eligible to their future airdrop), I will focus on Arbitrum and Optimism, which are commonly used for DeFi. The question is: How to find the best trading rates? There are three options:

• You can spend some time on Goingecko or Coinmarketcap in the market section to find the best rates;
• You can use some DEX (Decentralized Exchange) aggregators, like ParaSwap or 1inch;
• You can use some meta-DEX aggregators, like DefiLlama.

As I am a bit lazy, I decided to go directly to the third option, and to swap the little ETH that I had for USDC. It is quite easy to do. You simply go on swap.defillama.com, connect your METAMASK wallet, select the right chain and try to swap:

• On Optimism: the best trade is via ParaSwap - it makes you save about 10% vs. 1inch... which is mostly due to the high gas fees on 1inch

• On Arbitrum: the best trade is on OpenOcean which is significantly cheaper than the other DEX (including ParaSwap... the best DEX above)

Therefore, OpenOcean on Arbitrum seems to be by far the best option to trade small amounts like in the above example.

As it may vary with the tokens to be traded or the time of the trade, a meta-DEX aggregator like DefiLlama can help a lot.

Disclaimer: this article does not contain any financial advice. The information is provided for general informational and educational purposes only.

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