The Warning
A couple of days ago, the TronTokens Official Twitter account issued a warning about a little-known website called Kiwidex (kiwidex.io). We show you the text of the tweet:
#Alert – https://t.co/Nm8LKk9nB0#TRON Community, be careful. The exchange #KiwiDex is not decentralized. They lie.
Indeed, all your funds are sent at this address : TC6S1jRiyRy54qGnzDPYPNzy8Q18Xn3WxU
KiwiDex is centralized. No peer to peer. KiwiDex can be a #PONZISCHEME#TRX pic.twitter.com/KVv2GfKDHE
— TronTokens Official (@trontokens) February 13, 2019
In order to assess the warning about the website we took a few minutes to get acquainted with kiwidex.io and we, as well, detected a few things that are a tiny bit suspicious.
The website
It starts at the get-go. The website sells itself as “The world’s first decentralized exchange bases on TRON and supports mobile terminal”. Let’s not pay attention to the fact that people who’re doing this website can’t even write English (it’s supposed to be “based” not “base”). But nevermind the grammatic pedantry, the statement is just completely false.
The first Tron-based decentralized exchange was the DEX hosted at Tronscan. There’s just no way around that. And after Tronscan it was GOC. So things start to look fishy as soon as our browser loaded the webpage.
And about the rest of the warning, well, things don’t look any better.
If every deposit you do into the site is sent into a single address every time, then it just cannot be a decentralized service. The whole point in decentralization is that no single node in a network has any privilege, so if this was decentralized (as it claims), every transfer should be sent to a different node in the network.
Of course, those would have to be authorized nodes to take deposits in, so if the list was small, it would make sense, but you can’t have a decentralized network of one, just as you can’t have a football team of one.
So it’s centralized, that seems quite obvious?
What about P2P? Well, it’s a corollary. You need peers in order to build a p2p network, and if everything goes to a single address, that means that there are no peers, but only one central authority.
Should everybody avoid it?
So far we’re only telling you about things that are absolutely obvious because of the warning and from a very quick inspection to the website. Should you listen to that Twitter warning and stay away from the site? We believe so.
There are already good, reliable, and safe decentralized exchanges in the Tron network. We already mentioned two. So there’s is no need for you or anybody else to take even the smallest risk by sending tokens into a website that looks weird from the get-go.
Let’s just be clear about something: We don’t have proof positive that kiwidex.io is false, or dangerous, or fraudulent. What we are saying is, quite simply, that it doesn’t look great, and running useless risks is just pointless.
Investing in cryptocurrencies is already quite risky (which was the only truthful statement we found at the site), so why make it riskier by using a service whose reputation is questionable so easily and so quickly?
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.