Hi Bleujay,
Thanks for the kind words. In regards to your questions:
The Bitshares DEX is the engine that allows trading of any assets on the Bitshares network, The official interface to the Bitshares DEX is wallet.bitshares.org or any of the client application from the official Github page. These interfaces/wallets are maintained by the development team that are being paid by the Bitshares protocol itself - This payment occurs because a team proposed a 'worker' (worker proposal) which included their expect rate of pay, deliverable, start times, end times and other project specific information to the Bitshares Stakeholders. The Bitshares stakeholder approved this proposal which actually allows the Bitshares blockchain to release payment to these workers from the 'reserve pool'.
Openledger, Cryptobridge, RuDex, EasyDex, GDEX and others are all third party entities that are running exchange businesses similar to CEX's such as Bitfinex, PoloniEX ect.. These third parties are using the Bitshares DEX as their back end trading engine instead of maintaining their own server farm for order books and matching ect; Bitshares DEX free's these companies up to focus their attention to their own client interfaces, marketing, support, gateways (for non Bitshares native cryptocurrencies that trade on the Bitshares network, example: Open.ETH - ETH backed by Openledger).
Despite these companies offering different user interfaces to their customers if you are trading on the Bitshares DEX, Openledger DEX, GDEX DEX ect you are actually trading on the Bitshares main network and from the Bitshares DEX can buy or sell any of the assets offered by the third party exchanges; and vice versa - although some third parties promote their own assets or could even hide some assets from their customers as they control the user interface - The official interfaces allow full visibility to all assets.
I would love to be able to refer you as an LTM (Life Time Member) but the way it works is when you first sign up to Bitshares the network sets your referrer (This is part of the referral program available to LTM accounts ), from that point on you referrer gets a percentage of the fee's you pay (transfer, trade, register asset ect) this will continue for the life of your account or until you upgrade to an LTM - upgrading to an LTM cuts your ties to your registrar and referee and any percentage of the fee that was going to them now get returned to your account instead (don't feel bad they go 80% of the fee you paid to upgrade to an LTM).. So if you used my referral link to register initially i would be very happy to give you the discount on your LTM but an account cannot transfer referrers.
Lifetime Members get 80% cashback on every transaction fee they pay and qualify to earn referral income from users they register with or refer to the network and have the ability to register premium names
I will hunt you down on discord ;)
Thank you @steempower for your detailed answer.
You have brought understanding to the complexity.......thank you.
See you there. ^__^
All the best. Cheers.