The co-founders of 0x are Amir Bandeali and Will Warren. Warren is the CEO of the company and Amir is the CTO and both of them have knowledge for smart contracts and development. Warren used to conduct applied physics research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory after he finished studying mechanical engineering at UC San Diego. Bandeali worked as a fixed income trader with DRW after he finished university at the University of Illionois, Urbana-Champaign.

Among the other team members, there are plenty of blockchain engineers, graphic designers, product designers and software engineers as well as business strategists and people with many skills. The advisors for the project founded or work at companies such as Pantera Capital, Coinbase and Polychain. The 0x project is being funded by Fintech Blockchain Group, Jen Advisors and Blockchain capital.

When the co-founders decided to create the 0x project in October 2016, they hoped for a world that will allow for every asset’s representation as a part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ideally, this included assets that will have everything from digital game items and stocks, to gold and fiat currencies. With such a huge wave of tokenization, there will be hundreds of different types of tokens requiring a trustless exchange for users. The founders noticed the opportunity for improvement of decentralized exchanges and they hope to do just that. The team hopes to address the inefficiencies of decentralized crypto exchanges as well as the inability of various exchanges to work along.

Centralized crypto exchanges are the most common type of exchanges and are run by a single entity. The users of these exchanges deposit funds directly with the exchange and the exchange then becomes responsible for connecting the buy and sell processes in real time. One of the most popular centralized exchanges is Coinbase. One of the biggest risks with centralized exchanges is their exposure to hacking or front-running conducted by the administrator.

Decentralized exchanges were created to resolve the issues that the centralized exchanges had. With this type of crypto exchanges, the users keep control over their money and they can rely on digital signatures to directly authorize trading orders rather than sending the money right to a wallet controlled by one entity. This means that while the centralized exchanges are very fast, the decentralized ones are slower and they tend to have lower performance trading as well less advances tools that are simple to use.

The 0x project is much closer to a decentralized exchange than a centralized one but overall it has notable differences. The project addresses the main issues with the decentralized exchanges: they are expensive, not liquid, slow and cannot be operated with each other. To operate an order book on the blockchain, each adjustment or new order goes via the blockchain which means that everything is held to block times. This also results in network transaction fees at every interaction.

0x addresses both of those issues by developing a standard protocol which can be applied to all orders relayed off the blockchain. With this protocol, the orders have to go back on the blockchain when they get settled instead at every transaction. This will speed up the process and will eliminate some of the unnecessary transaction fees.

Since the project will prevent users from having to pay transaction fees by reducing the reliance on the blockchain, there is a huge opportunity for the 0x project to charge for use. However, it doesn’t charge fees of any type to use their protocol meaning that it is free. However, if someone chooses to create a decentralized crypto exchange using the protocol, that person can charge fees.