Could the decentralised exchange (DEX) potentially have more universal appeal if we allowed:
1) Trading assets against bitUSD (or other bit currencies).
2) Trading assets on margin.
I don't know if these things are technically feasible, but here's my rationale.
I think most people are familiar with trading assets against a base currency like USD. Currently its possible to trade bitAssets in such a way, but only outside the (DEX), at gateways and centralised exchanges. On the DEX, the assets must be traded against BTS. This is more complex for most people and involves switching to and from BTS (for which users may have no view) to switch between assets.
I think it could be attractive for users to hold a DEX account in their preferred base bitCurrency, and use that to fund positions in a portfolio of assets traded against that bitCurrency, rather than against BTS. Shorts may be more readily available, because its not limited to bulls in BTS. The concept of yield, spreads etc could be reconsidered for these assets to be something more like traditional CFD markets.
The bitCurrency account of the user could be used to support a higher exposure in the various asset derivatives. As per common practice, this would depend on the volatility of the assets, which can now be more easily measured against the bitCurrency, rather than being conflated with the volatility of BTS as part of a pair against BTS. These accounts could be frequently margined and adjusted as short positions are today. Despite the higher predictability of volatility against stable bitCurrencies, we would still need to consider what would happen in black-swan events where the pool on one side becomes insufficient to meet the other side.
The primary purpose of the BTS bulls is to support the creation of bitCurrencies, to be used to fund users' trading accounts. And users could effectively trade thousands of different assets in a way that is familiar to them from CFD markets.
[Afterthought: not only would this target a much larger potential market opportunity at this point, transaction fees/spreads would be charged on total exposures, not just margin amounts, and is earned around high trading activity, so this would start to become a much more meaningful income percentage for BTS.]