The Stellar DEX (often shortened to SDEX) is a decentralized exchange built directly into the Stellar network. Unlike a centralized exchange, the order book lives on the public Stellar ledger itself — every offer, trade and price is recorded on-chain and is visible to anyone in real time. Chartui is a real-time market-data and charting terminal that reads that public data and turns it into live charts, order books and trade flow for active Stellar traders.
On most blockchains a decentralized exchange is a smart contract you have to deploy and interact with. Stellar is different: the exchange is a native part of the protocol. Anyone can place a buy or sell offer for one asset against another, and the network keeps a classic limit order book on-ledger for every trading pair. When a new offer crosses an existing one, the protocol matches them automatically and settles the trade in the next ledger — roughly every five seconds.
Because the matching engine is the network, there is no custodian sitting between you and the book. Offers are made from your own account, and the market data — bids, asks, depth, and executed trades — is fully public. That transparency is exactly what makes the Stellar DEX a great source of real-time market data.
Every asset on Stellar (other than the native token, XLM) is issued by an account and identified by a code plus its issuer, for example USDC issued by Circle. Two assets with the same code but different issuers are different assets and trade in separate order books, so it's important to track the issuer when you read prices. Chartui surfaces the issuer alongside each pair so you always know exactly which market you're looking at.
If you want to go deeper on the two data feeds that make Stellar so readable, see our guide to the Stellar order book & live trade flow.
A centralized exchange holds your funds and runs its order book on private servers, so you only see the data it chooses to publish. The Stellar DEX runs on a public ledger, so the same market data is available to everyone, all the time. That makes it ideal for charting, analytics and watching order flow — which is exactly what Chartui is built for.