# What Problem is Polkastarter solving? The first ever [Initial Decentralized Exchange Offering (IDO) of Raven Protocol](https://medium.com/meet-one/how-to-participate-in-the-first-ido-on-binance-chain-4c1d873dc0cb) took place on Binance DEX on June 17th 2019. At the time, decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, had yet to gain much traction in the market. With the explosion of DeFi in 2020, DEXs increased in popularity, and IDOs became an inexpensive way to get around the centralized initial exchange offering model. The above in turn produced wild volatility and left many investors shell-shocked, additionally, this approach suffers from other significant downsides, most notably: * Projects need to provide liquidity on both the asset for sale (base currency) and a quote currency (usually ETH) for it to initially trade against. * Automated market makers, such as the one powering Uniswap, would dynamically adjust the asset’s price based on supply and demand. * Increasing popularity and usage of platforms such as Uniswap reinforced scalability issues, with Ethereum network fees skyrocketing and slow platform performance, leaving end-users frustrated. Users are increasingly demanding: * Cheap transactions * Secure, ultra-fast swaps * User-friendly design * The possibility to buy and move assets between blockchains Given our multi-chain support, projects can currently choose to raise on ETH, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Celo. Each network comes with its own advantages. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.polkastarter.com/what-are-the-benefits-of-fixed-swaps.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.