Originally published on Feb 23 2021 on our previous Medium account
Today we are delighted to present to the community the first of many articles on our Medium account. For our first article, we will take a look at what awaits you on SwapDEX’s two trading platforms, the Swap exchange and our Decentralised Exchange (DEX).
Both exchanges are currently accessible, but is important to stress that the exchanges, especially the DEX, do not have their full suite of features activated. We are regularly working on the code so we cannot presently guarantee the performance of the DEX. We therefore recommend people look at the platform only. Anyone actively trading on the platform at this stage does so at their own risk.
Given the code is being worked on and updated regularly, we also recommend that you clear your cache before visiting the exchanges to ensure you are viewing the most up-to-date version of the platform. The exchanges are currently optimised for use on desktop and this article focuses on the desktop experience, however in testing, the exchanges worked fine on mobile through Trust Wallet and MetaMask providing you log into the exchange via your wallet’s respective browser. Some features are limited on mobile at this stage.
The DEX
When you first access the DEX you will need to connect your wallet by selecting the Connect Wallet icon in the top right corner. Unlike a Centralised Exchange (CEX), there is no Know Your Customer identification, you simply connect your wallet and you are good to go.
The layout of the DEX should feel familiar to users who have traded on a CEX before. You can browse the available markets on the left side of the page, view price charts and any open orders you have in the middle and see the market orders, recent trades and place your own limit orders to buy and sell on the right.
Before you can place any buy or sell orders, there is a small once-off transaction required to give the DEX permission to interact with the token in your wallet to give it permission to validate your token balance and permit the trade of tokens. This fee will come up when you put in your first limit order for the token and will vary depending on the cost of gas, but it is a relatively small fee. This is required for each new token you wish to place an order for, but it is only required once per token.
When placing a limit order, you will be requested to confirm the order in your connected wallet but other than the initial fee described, there is no cost to place a buy or sell order. There is, however, a very small fee to cancel an order to remove it from the DEX.
We have added token pairs for a number of the most popular tokens, however we will add more markets for the full launch of the DEX.
What makes the DEX special?
On a traditional CEX, the CEX owns the order book and acts as the intermediary for all transactions which means you buy tokens from the CEX and sell tokens to the CEX. Our DEX operates differently, however, and acts as a facilitator with transactions generally taking place from wallet-to-wallet. In the spirit of true decentralisation, this means that the users of the DEX are directly providing liquidity for the DEX in the form of their buy and sell orders. The DEX also shares liquidity with the Swap exchange, so if the market price on a pair on the Swap reaches the price you have for a sell or buy order on the same pair on the DEX, it will be processed by the Swap market.
The Swap Exchange
The Swap exchange operates similarly to existing Swap exchanges in this space. Liquidity is added to token pairs on the platform to enable users to purchase tokens at the going market rate. Buys will increase the market price for the token while sells will reduce the price. As with other similar exchanges, a liquidity provider fee of 0.3% applies to transactions with this fee being distributed to the pair’s liquidity providers. Slippage is the tolerance you are willing to accept in price changes while the transaction is taking place. Low slippage is recommended however during times of high volume, or if tokens have in built burn functions, you may need to increase the slippage for the transaction to go through. Gas is automatically set to high on SwapDEX in order to protect users from front-running bots which operate on other exchanges that steal user’s profits by sending transactions at higher gas to take advantage of high slippage margins.
Other than a negligible amount of liquidity for the SDX / Eth pair for some internal testing, there is not currently any liquidity on the Swap exchange. The exchange, however, is fully functional so other users or projects are very welcome to add liquidity to any other pairs to have another platform on which they can trade.
On its full launch, the Swap exchange will be powered by an aggregator which will source the best price from a number of different exchanges, giving full access to all available token pairs at the lowest possible price.
The Future
We are aware that gas is currently a major issue on the Etherum blockchain so we are accelerating our efforts to move the platform onto its own chain. We previously planned to move onto our own chain after launch, but we now plan to be on our own chain at launch. This will make gas issues a thing of the past.
Some of the key features that will be on the full platform include:
- Moving the platform to our own chain where the native SwapDEX token (SDX) will be used for gas resulting in substantial savings in transaction fees and the ability to trade across chains. This chain will operate on a Proof of Stake model where holders of SDX will have the opportunity to contribute to become a node for the chain.
- Aggregator added to the Swap exchange. The aggregator will pool liquidity across a number of different exchanges in order to give you the cheapest rate when purchasing coins. During testing, when operating on the Ethereum network, SwapDEX provided the cheapest price after fees 7/10 times. This number will increase furthermore when we are operating on our own chain with a substantial reduction in transaction fees.
- Launch of the platform’s Stablecoin which will be soft-pegged to the US dollar.
- Lending platform to allow users to put their tokens up as collateral for loans for a small interest fee. This means you will not need to sell your tokens just to buy into another project.
- Staking of the SDX token. All income from the platform, such as transaction fees from the exchanges or interest from loans, will go into a central fund where it will be converted to the Stablecoin and distributed to stakers of the SDX token on a pro-rata basis.
We will provide more information on all the above features in further articles over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we hope you take the chance to have a closer look at our exchanges and we welcome you to follow our Medium account and reach out via our Discord, Telegram or Twitter if you have any questions, comments or feedback.
We also welcome you to read over our White paper and if you are interested in investing in the project, you can buy on Uniswap.
While we have links throughout the article, for ease of reference, the exchanges are accessible at the following addresses:
