Why should I launch an exchange when there are already hundreds of existing exchange?
As a entrepreneur: Exchange services is very difficult to differentiate. It’s a commodity service. Why should I invest in marketing to promote my new exchange?
As a customer: Why should I buy tokens?
- Most of existing tokens have not active project behind
- Many times the token is useless for the project and it will not increase in value if project succeed (just see ZRX token. It’s down -76% from 52wk high while your team is working actively on the project. Why investors have to buy tokens?
If you want to list the same assets as everyone else with the same interface in the same markets, then yes, it's hard to compete. However, we see a world of tokenized assets coming online that will need unique markets for exchange. Something like Radar Relay (https://radarrelay.com/ for ERC-20 commodities) is totally different from Veil (https://veil.co/ for prediction market shares) is totally different from BoxSwap (https://boxswap.io/ for trading collectibles). Even within ERC-20 commodities exchange, there are many different models of exchange within different markets that are sufficiently differentiated.
We think of 0x more like Stripe: an under-the-hood technology that allows entrepreneurs to move more quickly and easily add exchange to their product. The concept of "tokens" and "exchange" will become very abstract in the near future.
I'll give you my answer because I have a project which could have used this.
I created a dapp that allows people to do [stuff] which generate some erc-20 token for users. They can then use this token to access special features on the dapp.
It's easy to let users send and receive the tokens they have. But I want the token to have a value outside the dapp itself.
Unfortunately I cannot get this token accepted on coinbase and other exchanges. Just because it is not important enough.
I still want people to be able to sell or buy these tokens. The next best idea is to create a small exchange platform on my dapp: let people trade the token for ether or for other tokens. It's time consuming to code so I gave up.
Now this is where this thing would have been great.
> Exchange services is very difficult to differentiate.
Because financial markets are very globally fragmented. The hardest part about opening an exchange is banking, clearance and KYC/AML. For example the chance that a citizen of say Benin or Uzbekistan could open safely and easily open an account at one of the major crypto exchanges is essentially zero.
There's a lot of parts of the world where there's a captive audience with high demand for crypto trading, but no decent service available. There are pre-existing traditional brokerages and forex shops that have the local banking and KYC/AML infrastructure place, but don't have the tech for the exchange itself.
Think more broadly about what an "exchange" could be. You're thinking crypto forex, but consider a crypto-kitty bidding platform or a virtual game item marketplace.
Answering why is up to you, the builder; differentiation is key to why 0x has created this protocol.
"Tokens" can be a special kind of object which can be "exchanged" for other kinds of objects. It is not always about purchasing or swapping; this interaction can solve many different kinds of coordination problems.
The exchange can create a context around users interacting via various types of tokens, enabling new kinds of services and communities to form. This could lead to enormous value for users.
Different jurisdictions have different compliance requirements. Not sure, but my guess is the goal of this project is to allow regulatory arbitrage with a single unified interface.
As a customer I want an exchange so that the tokens I buy have some liquidity, at least in theory. You're not going to be listed on an exchange initially and those exchanges that do list smaller tokens tend to be sketchy.
As an entrepreneur, you figure out how your use-case benefits from tokens. For example, let's say you provide a product/service. You can sell tokens that can be redeemed for the product/service to investors at a "wholesale price".
There's no need for tokens to go "to the moon", just to serve as a medium of exchange and ideally provide some margin to you and/or your investors. You could also offer a company ownership structure for tokens, but now you're in securities regulation territory, which nobody wants to deal with right now, at least at the moment.
Of course a lot of crypto projects are garbage, just like most businesses fail and wipe out investor money in the process. The hype surrounding crypto certainly has massively underpriced risk, but the same could be said about stock like Tesla, Lyft or Uber.
>> Why should I launch an exchange when there are already hundreds of existing exchange?
Maybe you have the on-off ramps sorted out, a friendly bank and a regulatory environment, licenses, legitimate AML/KYC measures and can do it properly?
While there are many exchanges already, how many can say they're that above board?
The market has ridiculous demand really, at times. But it highly depends on timing, location etc. And also resilience. If you run the exchange for long enough time, you will collect customers who will be coming back.
There's actually several use cases here that are worth noting. As technology improves, more and more centralized crypto exchanges (where the majority of trading volume currently lies) are creating decentralized counterparts - yielding lower custodial risk among other benefits. Also, newer blockchains that don't have DEX's yet are completely untapped markets for developers. Lastly, there are a variety of different use cases beyond just an exchange that benefit from basic exchange templates: prediction markets, decentralized lending, etc.
In a worldview where communities, orgs, products, countries, states, provinces etc. all have their own tokens, there will be need for niche, localized exchanges and 0x makes a lllot of sense.
After reading the Why page, I still don't have a concrete notion of what this is. So I'll jab a few questions that might help me make some sense:
First question is about decentralization. What is off-chain relay in this case? Is that a centralized part of the system? Are there centralized parts of the system?
Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading? To my knowledge, only centralized exchanges/brokers currently exist for margin trading.
What settlement speeds can be expected?
That's it for the questions. I don't want to retract from them, but I'll mention that the site doesn't work well with Dark Reader: all theme generation modes, except static, render most of the text invisible.
Been following the 0x project for a while, just want to say this is an amazing project that demonstrates the power and potential of smart contracts and decentralized finance. Keep up the good work!
I think i see what you are doing here while others are missing the point. If there is an open source ui, there is an open source api as well. My do-something-usefull-for-users app isn't going to launch a full exchange - but what I would implement is the api library allowing a user to exchange utility and $$ tokens from one to another while staying in my app.
ergo, the user benefit here is that the user only needs a Coinbase or like account to transfer dollars to tokens, and then the user can obtain other tokens within any particular app. The user doesn't need to sign up to yet-another-exchange-with-my-personal-data-and-who-are-these-people-anyway-and-do-they-have-the-tokens-i-use-etc,etc. Now the user can readily take tokens not in use on one platform and transfer them to a token of another platform, all without leaving the platform specific application. That's a big win for the ecosystem.
I can see why you built the slick ui to demo your product, i think it's the right move because i can use it without a single line of code. I think the next challenge you will have is getting developers to adopt an underlying api client library. If I understand what you are doing correctly, perhaps build that client library in js to be used in react and a demo app that has reduced exchange funcationality for quickly swapping two tokens. it should look as simple as the interface for sending tokens to someone now.
If I guessed all that right, the company i work for may be willing to be an early adaptor. Let me know. We certainly aren't going to build yet-another-exchange, but i think empowering a transfer of btc/eth/eos/xrp -> myLittleUtilityToken within app would be very powerful.
How does this manage to connect the real world to a blockchain? The fundamental problem with the promises of insurance/bonds/stocks/whatever on a blockchain is that it doesn't matter what the blockchain says, people's real-world actions aren't tied to it, so it's not trustless. And so the blockchain part is pointless.
Only if all the related elements are all virtual and on the blockchain can it do anything - so we're stuck with gambling and cryptokitties for real world usage.
Another related issue is that tokens are bearer instruments controlled by whoever holds the right private keys.
Most investments regulated in the US cannot legally be bearer instruments. This means there must be a ledger listing who owns what with real names attached. For public companies they must use a registered transfer agent to keep these ownership records. Private companies can keep their own records, but in most cases cannot use bearer instruments. What happens if I transfer you the token if there is a master ownership ledger with names and addresses? Nothing happens. The token record becomes out of sync with reality is the only thing that happens.
Sounds like you're referring to security tokens, which place a securitized asset's cap table on a public blockchain. 0x works with all tokenized assets, so we're not opinionated about which assets people want to trade -- other companies like Harbor (https://harbor.com/) offer tokenization services. You're right that placing bearer instruments on a public blockchain presents some issues and the jury is still out a bit.
An alternative might be found in protocols like UMA (https://umaproject.org/), Augur (https://www.augur.net/) or MakerDAO (https://makerdao.com/) which allow you create synthetic tokens that trustlessly track the price of a real-world asset by creating financial incentives to rebalance the price of the minted tokens. MakerDAO has already been used to create over $80MM in a synthetic USD token called Dai (https://makerdao.com/dai/) and UMA has created a synthetic S&P500 token, allowing anyone anywhere around the world to get exposure to US Stocks (https://medium.com/uma-project/announcing-us-stock-index-tok...).
Forgive the potentially dumb question but I'm pretty green in the crypto and finance spaces. What's the business value here? As in, why has this been funded so heavily? Does 0x take a cut of all trades on 0x powered exchanges and marketplaces? Or is the data that holds the value?
Looks interesting will give it a whirl. At work we have semi-jokingly been discussing idea of a internal currency as a mechanism of getting one team to do work for another when there is no obvious mutual benefit for said work. Its increasingly becoming an issue for us.
When 0x was conceived, there were far fewer crytocurrency exchanges than there are today. It aimed to solve a real problem that still exists in some ways.
Since 0x is a blockchain project, it has moved at a snail's pace compared to the multitude of centralized and web-based "decentralized" exchanges that have sprung up since. These newer exchanges have largely solved the needs identified by 0x.
There's still a big problem with many of the centralized exchanges that have sprung up: a bunch of them are exit-scamming, or otherwise have had incidents that make your funds inaccessible.
That's the reason to do this on the blockchain: you don't need to trust that the exchange operators will keep your funds safe, because they don't have your funds.
Too expensive for who? 0x protocol allows you trade digital assets with anyone in the world, trustlessly, through the internet, for $0.10-$0.25 per trade. While this isn't perfect for all use cases, it is an incredibly powerful capability.
Given the limitations of 0x, I never thought of it as a good protocol for real-time exchanges (ie Coinbase Pro). For me, it's always fit more into a decentralized Over the Counter (OTC) trading alternative.
The speed of execution limitation is not because of 0x, but because of how fast a tx can be registered on the block chain. It can't compete (they say for now) at settlement speed with a high performance centralized exchange.
But you have to trust those centralized exchanges with your funds. While with 0x you don't have to. One could say centralized exchanges can't compete on trustlesness with decentralized ones.
Hardly a week goes by without one folding due to hacking, mismanagement, or outright criminal activity. Seems like they need someone to keep up the churn or they might run low.
Well, what's currently your favorite decentralized exchange, prior to 0x?
What do you suggest for people who live in regions where this technology is banned or where the difficulties of connecting orthodox bank accounts, etc, make access impossible?
The last decentralized exchange I knew about was EtherDelta, and 0x seems to be an improvement.
OP is referring to the curious death of the founder of QuadrigaCX who supposedly was the only one with the keys to cold storage.
This does not apply to 0x-based exchanges at all - it's a nuncustodial solution, meaning you can put orders without depositing coins and ensure they are only transferred out of your wallet as part of a correctly executed trade, atomically.
leoplct|6 years ago
As a entrepreneur: Exchange services is very difficult to differentiate. It’s a commodity service. Why should I invest in marketing to promote my new exchange?
As a customer: Why should I buy tokens? - Most of existing tokens have not active project behind - Many times the token is useless for the project and it will not increase in value if project succeed (just see ZRX token. It’s down -76% from 52wk high while your team is working actively on the project. Why investors have to buy tokens?
tomhschmidt|6 years ago
We think of 0x more like Stripe: an under-the-hood technology that allows entrepreneurs to move more quickly and easily add exchange to their product. The concept of "tokens" and "exchange" will become very abstract in the near future.
baby|6 years ago
I created a dapp that allows people to do [stuff] which generate some erc-20 token for users. They can then use this token to access special features on the dapp.
It's easy to let users send and receive the tokens they have. But I want the token to have a value outside the dapp itself.
Unfortunately I cannot get this token accepted on coinbase and other exchanges. Just because it is not important enough.
I still want people to be able to sell or buy these tokens. The next best idea is to create a small exchange platform on my dapp: let people trade the token for ether or for other tokens. It's time consuming to code so I gave up.
Now this is where this thing would have been great.
Hope this helps.
dcolkitt|6 years ago
Because financial markets are very globally fragmented. The hardest part about opening an exchange is banking, clearance and KYC/AML. For example the chance that a citizen of say Benin or Uzbekistan could open safely and easily open an account at one of the major crypto exchanges is essentially zero.
There's a lot of parts of the world where there's a captive audience with high demand for crypto trading, but no decent service available. There are pre-existing traditional brokerages and forex shops that have the local banking and KYC/AML infrastructure place, but don't have the tech for the exchange itself.
nipponese|6 years ago
jamespitts|6 years ago
"Tokens" can be a special kind of object which can be "exchanged" for other kinds of objects. It is not always about purchasing or swapping; this interaction can solve many different kinds of coordination problems.
The exchange can create a context around users interacting via various types of tokens, enabling new kinds of services and communities to form. This could lead to enormous value for users.
aakilfernandes|6 years ago
gridlockd|6 years ago
As a customer I want an exchange so that the tokens I buy have some liquidity, at least in theory. You're not going to be listed on an exchange initially and those exchanges that do list smaller tokens tend to be sketchy.
As an entrepreneur, you figure out how your use-case benefits from tokens. For example, let's say you provide a product/service. You can sell tokens that can be redeemed for the product/service to investors at a "wholesale price".
There's no need for tokens to go "to the moon", just to serve as a medium of exchange and ideally provide some margin to you and/or your investors. You could also offer a company ownership structure for tokens, but now you're in securities regulation territory, which nobody wants to deal with right now, at least at the moment.
Of course a lot of crypto projects are garbage, just like most businesses fail and wipe out investor money in the process. The hype surrounding crypto certainly has massively underpriced risk, but the same could be said about stock like Tesla, Lyft or Uber.
Nursie|6 years ago
Maybe you have the on-off ramps sorted out, a friendly bank and a regulatory environment, licenses, legitimate AML/KYC measures and can do it properly?
While there are many exchanges already, how many can say they're that above board?
repomies68|6 years ago
swinges|6 years ago
There's actually several use cases here that are worth noting. As technology improves, more and more centralized crypto exchanges (where the majority of trading volume currently lies) are creating decentralized counterparts - yielding lower custodial risk among other benefits. Also, newer blockchains that don't have DEX's yet are completely untapped markets for developers. Lastly, there are a variety of different use cases beyond just an exchange that benefit from basic exchange templates: prediction markets, decentralized lending, etc.
Disclaimer: I work for Hydro (https://hydroprotocol.io/), a competing product.
proy24|6 years ago
bartimus|6 years ago
Animats|6 years ago
Because you can steal the assets, like about half of Bitcoin exchanges to date.
treelovinhippie|6 years ago
[deleted]
tacosx|6 years ago
[deleted]
deadmetheny|6 years ago
[deleted]
ForHackernews|6 years ago
[deleted]
tomhschmidt|6 years ago
dmos62|6 years ago
After reading the Why page, I still don't have a concrete notion of what this is. So I'll jab a few questions that might help me make some sense:
First question is about decentralization. What is off-chain relay in this case? Is that a centralized part of the system? Are there centralized parts of the system?
Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading? To my knowledge, only centralized exchanges/brokers currently exist for margin trading.
What settlement speeds can be expected?
That's it for the questions. I don't want to retract from them, but I'll mention that the site doesn't work well with Dark Reader: all theme generation modes, except static, render most of the text invisible.
v64|6 years ago
johnmarcus|6 years ago
ergo, the user benefit here is that the user only needs a Coinbase or like account to transfer dollars to tokens, and then the user can obtain other tokens within any particular app. The user doesn't need to sign up to yet-another-exchange-with-my-personal-data-and-who-are-these-people-anyway-and-do-they-have-the-tokens-i-use-etc,etc. Now the user can readily take tokens not in use on one platform and transfer them to a token of another platform, all without leaving the platform specific application. That's a big win for the ecosystem.
I can see why you built the slick ui to demo your product, i think it's the right move because i can use it without a single line of code. I think the next challenge you will have is getting developers to adopt an underlying api client library. If I understand what you are doing correctly, perhaps build that client library in js to be used in react and a demo app that has reduced exchange funcationality for quickly swapping two tokens. it should look as simple as the interface for sending tokens to someone now.
If I guessed all that right, the company i work for may be willing to be an early adaptor. Let me know. We certainly aren't going to build yet-another-exchange, but i think empowering a transfer of btc/eth/eos/xrp -> myLittleUtilityToken within app would be very powerful.
flyGuyOnTheSly|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
rando444|6 years ago
I'm extremely curious what the business model here is.
Who is paying for this to be created, and what do they get out of it in the long run?
bananocurrency|6 years ago
stcredzero|6 years ago
turtlecloud|6 years ago
joosters|6 years ago
Only if all the related elements are all virtual and on the blockchain can it do anything - so we're stuck with gambling and cryptokitties for real world usage.
dangero|6 years ago
Most investments regulated in the US cannot legally be bearer instruments. This means there must be a ledger listing who owns what with real names attached. For public companies they must use a registered transfer agent to keep these ownership records. Private companies can keep their own records, but in most cases cannot use bearer instruments. What happens if I transfer you the token if there is a master ownership ledger with names and addresses? Nothing happens. The token record becomes out of sync with reality is the only thing that happens.
tomhschmidt|6 years ago
An alternative might be found in protocols like UMA (https://umaproject.org/), Augur (https://www.augur.net/) or MakerDAO (https://makerdao.com/) which allow you create synthetic tokens that trustlessly track the price of a real-world asset by creating financial incentives to rebalance the price of the minted tokens. MakerDAO has already been used to create over $80MM in a synthetic USD token called Dai (https://makerdao.com/dai/) and UMA has created a synthetic S&P500 token, allowing anyone anywhere around the world to get exposure to US Stocks (https://medium.com/uma-project/announcing-us-stock-index-tok...).
throwaway2016a|6 years ago
1. Technology
2. Regulatory
3. Trust
4. Critical mass
This looks like it only address 1. Which is certainly a big hurdle but I would have loved to seen something explaining how to get 2 - 4 done.
From some of the answers bellow:
> You don't have to trust! 0x Exchanges are non-custodial
That's great. There should be a writeup on that front and center of the how and why.
munificent|6 years ago
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dstick|6 years ago
CyrusL|6 years ago
tomhschmidt|6 years ago
duncan-donuts|6 years ago
afro88|6 years ago
gregorymichael|6 years ago
monkeydust|6 years ago
nradov|6 years ago
mgraczyk|6 years ago
Since 0x is a blockchain project, it has moved at a snail's pace compared to the multitude of centralized and web-based "decentralized" exchanges that have sprung up since. These newer exchanges have largely solved the needs identified by 0x.
nostrademons|6 years ago
That's the reason to do this on the blockchain: you don't need to trust that the exchange operators will keep your funds safe, because they don't have your funds.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
homakov|6 years ago
willwarren89|6 years ago
Too expensive for who? 0x protocol allows you trade digital assets with anyone in the world, trustlessly, through the internet, for $0.10-$0.25 per trade. While this isn't perfect for all use cases, it is an incredibly powerful capability.
Scaling is indeed a limitation for decentralized networks. You can learn more about our scaling R&D efforts here: https://blog.0xproject.com/0x-roadmap-2019-part-2-scalabilit...
patricklorio|6 years ago
tudorconstantin|6 years ago
But you have to trust those centralized exchanges with your funds. While with 0x you don't have to. One could say centralized exchanges can't compete on trustlesness with decentralized ones.
progval|6 years ago
raidicy|6 years ago
vasilipupkin|6 years ago
LAMike|6 years ago
thehazard|6 years ago
iqihs|6 years ago
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34r45sdg|6 years ago
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TylerE|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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steveharman|6 years ago
Hardly a week goes by without a couple of new ones starting. Surely we must have more than enough by now?
jandrese|6 years ago
jMyles|6 years ago
What do you suggest for people who live in regions where this technology is banned or where the difficulties of connecting orthodox bank accounts, etc, make access impossible?
The last decentralized exchange I knew about was EtherDelta, and 0x seems to be an improvement.
unknown|6 years ago
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hhorsley|6 years ago
detritus|6 years ago
sctb|6 years ago
jldevops|6 years ago
Just curious, does anyone know of a kit like this for digital marketplaces for goods or services (not crypto)?
deepspace|6 years ago
[deleted]
Legogris|6 years ago
This does not apply to 0x-based exchanges at all - it's a nuncustodial solution, meaning you can put orders without depositing coins and ensure they are only transferred out of your wallet as part of a correctly executed trade, atomically.
xrd|6 years ago
[deleted]
Lowkeyloki|6 years ago
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