DexHunter
Nikita Melentjevs, founder of DexHunter, shares his journey from NFT trading to creating one of Cardano's top DEX aggregators. In this interview, he delves into the technical challenges and innovative solutions behind DexHunter's success. One of the most significant challenges was reverse-engineering DEX smart contracts to enable seamless interaction with a diverse range of DEXs. By overcoming this hurdle, DexHunter has been able to provide users with a wider range of trading pairs, and more.
Melentjevs emphasizes the importance of community feedback in shaping DexHunter's development. By actively listening to user input, the team has been able to improve the platform's user experience. Sounds Exciting? Well.. let's dive right in.
Hello, Nikita Melentjevs. It's great to connect with you today and learn more about DexHunter - something I’m really looking forward to. But before we dive into that, could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
My name’s Nick, but most of the people in the community know me as melon. I am a software developer with a financial background and I have been building on Cardano for about 4 years now.
Originally I have started with NFT trading and NFT analytics and worked for jpg.store, but then transitioned more into DeFi and token trading, and now I run a Cardano trading platform and dex aggregator - DexHunter.
How did the idea for DexHunter come about? What specific problem were you trying to solve? Please take us along on that journey.
As a trader myself and as someone who is passionate about good UX and designs I have noticed for a long time, ever since I was in Cardano, that our tech is great, our developers are amazing, but our presentation and user interactions were always lacking, so we were looking to build something that would feel smooth to user while being technologically advanced in the background.
How did your financial background influence the features and direction of DexHunter?
I would say my traditional understanding of finances was very different from what I've learned in crypto, where psychology and perception play a much larger role than fundamentals. It's important to understand the core principles, but also to remain adaptable and keep learning. When it comes to DexHunter, I had to start from scratch with DeFi and understanding how DEXes work, as decentralized peer-to-peer transactions are a completely new paradigm that didn’t exist in traditional finance.
Can you share some of the early challenges you faced when starting DexHunter, and how things have evolved since then?
Most of the challenges we faced were blockchain-related, particularly reverse-engineering DEX smart contracts to integrate/plug them into our trading systems. Maintaining real-time data has also been a significant challenge, as there must be no delay between user interactions, feedback, and price movements. Even today, we’re continually improving these processes to make them as precise and fast as possible.
What does the reverse-engineering process of DEX smart contracts entail? During the early days, we focused on figuring out how to directly interface with DEX contracts on-chain. With no documentation available and contracts not open-sourced, we had to rely on trial and error, breaking down datums and other technical elements to construct transactions without third-party dependencies. This approach aligns with one of DexHunter’s core principles: building an infrastructure that we can fully control. This ensures greater confidence, precision, and control—critical elements for delivering the best possible user experience.
Excellent! Thank you for the extensive introduction. This really helps us understand your background and a bit about DexHunter history. We're happy to have you as part of our ecosystem.
Now, let's dive into the world of DexHunter. In simple terms, how would you explain DexHunter to someone new to DeFi?
DexHunter combines all different trading platforms into a single solution, providing users with the best prices, rapid updates, and a smooth, seamless user experience.
What are the key features that differentiate DexHunter from other DEX aggregators on Cardano?
What separates us the most is the quickest trading experience and our meticulous attention to detail, from design elements to user-requested features.
We maintain close connections with the Cardano trading community, so we know exactly what issues people are experiencing - making users feel heard and valued. We are also integrated with over 50 major projects and almost all the wallets on Cardano. Any trading you do on Cardano is pretty much powered with our infrastructure; hence we process over 60% of all daily trades on average in the past few months.
DexHunter emphasizes user experience. Can you share some specific design choices that reflect this focus?
User experience consists of many things for us; one of the most important is instant user feedback. Despite Cardano taking some 10s of seconds to process and reflect the actual swap completion, trading on DexHunter feels quick because we show the order immediately on placement, we reflect balance change immediately ahead of wallets etc.
Many small details combined create a seamless experience for users where they feel in control and understand what is happening to their trades with no confusion. Of course, we also focus on quick page and data updates and you can move all across the website using keyboard shortcuts. So basically heavy priority is on interface quickness which subconsciously would feel like trading is quick itself too.
Are there any upcoming features or partnerships that you're particularly excited about?
I am extremely excited for Cardano finally getting onboarded to huge multi-chain platforms like DexScreener, DexTools and BubbleMaps and we are working on integrating DexHunter infrastructure to enable Cardano token trading there.
What are DexHunter's long-term goals and ambitions?
We’re working on introducing one-click trading and a complete platform redesign to make your experience even more seamless and user-friendly. Next year we plan to enable Bitcoin liquidity on Cardano and potentially even expand to Bitcoin itself.
Is there anything else you'd like our readers to know about DexHunter or its mission?
Our original mission was to become the de facto trading platform on Cardano, a goal we’ve successfully achieved. Now, we aim to expand that success and become the go-to trading platform in the entire crypto space, while onboarding as many users as we can to Cardano.
Maybe a question I should have asked earlier, but I figured, lets not close without asking: what do you enjoy doing in your free time, outside of the world of crypto?
In my free time I try to disassociate from work as much as possible; however that is very tricky as crypto lives 24/7/365, so I just try to travel a lot, join conferences, and spend quality time with my loved ones.
Tell us about your team. Who are the people behind DexHunter?