The "exchanges" unfortunately have let us down over and over and over again, partly because they are not actually aligned with the "value" of coins so much as with the "volume" of trade, and specifically the volume that happens on their own specific platform.
This has been going on for years upon years, so much so that the vast majority of trades have tended to be person to person without using a "market" mechanism.
So really what is needed is just "price discovery", after that perhaps "liquidity", and in fact because "volume" is actually a measure of how much "liquidity" had been consumed (eaten up, used, cancelled out) volume can in fact be a problem in a way because each unit of volume is an amount of liquidity gone away.
So maybe ideally what is needed is a vast massive liquidity, ideally enough buy side to buy ALL the coins and enough sell side to consume ALL the various things of value anyone ever wants to trade in for coins.
The actual volume of trade that happens on such a platform is secondary, as I said actual trade happening on it consumes its liquidity so the more trade volume it actually has the more liquidity we would have to keep coming up with to prevent the volume from consuming ALL the liquidity.
(Like for example if all 21 million coins were on there as liquidity, that is, as available to buy, and one day someone bought all 21 millon of them, boom, big volume but not no liquidity left unless they chose to put some of them back up for sale.)
Thus I think the incentives of most "exchanges" are not aligned with the needs of coins and their users.
I think what is needed is the incentive to be the actual value of the coin itself, NOT what commissions can be made by "disinterested providing of a platform for trades".
So I think maybe what is needed is platforms that ARE interested, that is why I have constantly wanted there to be secure reliable free open source software for trading platforms, so that when someone releases/creates a coin they can just as easily accompany it not only with a block explorer and a website but also a platform for exchanging it.
Ultimately so far that has led me to the STELLAR and HORIZON platforms. Especially STELLAR because in STELLAR you can trade anything against anything else without the platform's own native coin having to be one side of each pair.
Also though, because exchanges have historically failed us over and over and over again as mechanisms for "value discovery", I have also been moving to a system of "treasuries", so that I can compute the value of a coin simply by dividing the number minted of it into the value of its "treasury". This has let me come up with "reasonable" values for lots of coins that have fallen afoul of the "disinterestedness" of exchanges resulting in many people seeming to think there is no place they can actually trade those coins.
Take a look at
http://MakeMoney.knotwork.com/ for lists of assets that can currently already be traded on HORIZON and on STELLAR and let me know if you are interested in trading any of them...
I0Coin and other merged-mined coins such as IXCoin and DeVCoin are among those listed, as are the two original scrypt coins that are older than LiTeCoin, and many of the "Sci-Fi themed" coins.
-MarkM-