Stay Away from Crypto-Bridge

Crypto-Bridge is supposed to be a decentralized exchange, built on top of BitShares, which was one of Dan Larimer's projects. I have said good things about it and have been very excited about it in the past, but I have had quite a terrible experience with it of late.

I don't understand how it is supposed to work in a decentralized way, to be quite honest. You still send your coins to an address and it seems to function the same way a centralized exchange does. However, apparently there is no central place your funds are being held; somehow there are these decentralized "gateways" where your funds are. You get a private key/password, and they claim that you can always get your funds with this key, even if the platform were to go down.

This might technically be true, that you can recover your funds, but I have no idea how. And the experience I had recently with the platform indicates that this platform is not decentralized at all.

Crypto-Bridge has been having terrible problems with withdrawals not going through. Over and over, for weeks, maybe months now. I'm (quite unfortunately) staking some BridgeCoin, and I also have a Rhenium masternode (also unfortunate, don't buy this) - and the rewards from both of these can only be traded on Crypto-Bridge. So I am sort of forced to use it.

I have put in maybe 5 tickets because of missing, stuck withdrawals. Once, they sent me a double withdraw. Meaning, they sent me the money I withdrew, and then they sent it again.

I emailed support asking what to do, and asked about it again on Discord. No answer. So I kept it, and figured if they ever asked me I'd give it back. Fine.

So then I withdrew some bitcoin and didn't get it. Sent in a ticket, and asked every other day on discord for someone to check it. Nothing. And then I tried to withdraw some litecoin. Stuck.

And finally, after more than a week, one of the admins on Discord DM'd me and informed me they had locked me account. And so I was told I would need to send the BTC I had gotten as a result of the double withdraw back to my account, and then they would take that, and unlock my account, which would free up my stuck withdrawals.

This doesn't sound like a decentralized exchange, does it? Some centralized authority can take my funds and hold them hostage until I do what they say? Welp. To hell with this exchange. I'm going to carefully avoid anything that only trades on the Bridge and I'm going to dump my BCO when my staking period is done.

Edit - I don't mean to imply that they should let me have the BTC they accientally sent me. I'm glad to give it back. I just am astonished that a so-called "decentralized" exchange could do what they are doing, and am fed up with the platform not working.