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?
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.
Could one think of stores as one-sided exchanges, where resale is just not natively possible? Does Google operate an ad exchange? Is iTunes an exchange? If digital goods ownership were on a blockchain then resale would be possible... What about physical goods?
One’s velocity should always be slightly less than their SEC defense attorney. If you're legit, take the time to make sure your paperwork is legit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185701 (Top comment by Animats should draw your attention)
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.
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 of chains as subnets on the internet. The gaps will be bridged to allow seamless transfers between them.
I've been wrong before but to me this is bound to happen. How many businesses in competitive areas have fax as a preferred method of communication today?
Don't take what I'm saying as an argument in favor of buying ZRX tokens. I do think it's a cool project, albeit IMO could have done better without the utility token as an inherent component. But that's more about the business model than the tech. It will probably be another boom and bust before we see the leading protocols emerging.
"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.
In what way? I think that was the parent poster's question. I think it's fair if we're going to be making huge broad-strokes claims we should at least attempt to justify them.
Or more trivially, TPL for account tagging.
Microsoft's initiative on decentralized identity leveraging on the Bitcoin blockchains could be a component in this. Excellent podcast episode here: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/what-bitcoin-did-107-m...
Not to say you're completely wrong, just that smart contracts can be used to enforce regulation rather than skirt it - like any tool the outcome depends on the intentions of the one wielding it. :)
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.
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?
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.
Because you can steal the assets, like about half of Bitcoin exchanges to date.
That's the genius of the 0x protocol. The Relayers that LaunchKit lets you create are effectively just order books or other matching-engines that exist as a website or other service. They expose completed trades to the 0x smart contract, which atomically swaps the tokens of the trade. (Official 0x people can correct me here, I've done just a bit of research.) At no point does any organization other than you actually have control of your funds, nor can they receive them without giving you equivalent funds under the terms of the trade.
I've said before that the real use-cases for blockchains will be in doing stuff that nobody in their right mind would want to do because it's currently foolhardy. This is a good example. Giving money to a fly-by-night exchange is foolhardy - unless you don't have to give money to them. And that's what 0x enables: tradable assets without trust.
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.
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?
Off-chain relay is how parties find each other facilitate a trade. As a maker, I can create an order off-chain, but I still need to find a relevant taker who is interested in filling the order by sending it to the 0x smart contracts on-chain. Relayers pool together these off-chain orders and serve them up through a website, so that it's easy to find people to trade with. Note that this process is optional -- you can still trade peer-to-peer if I send you the order over email, SMS, etc. While relaying is centralized, relayers are non-custodial, so your funds are never at risk. We also have plans to make some parts of relaying less centralized in the future through 0x Mesh: https://blog.0xproject.com/0x-roadmap-2019-part-3-networked-...
Can this be used to implement more robust margin trading?
As for margin trading, yes, you can trade dY/dX tokens on 0x relayers, or combine 0x orders with any on-chain lending protocol such as Dharma or MakerDAO to get leverage.
What settlement speeds can be expected?
All trades currently settle on-chain, so the Ethereum block time is our bottleneck. Look for some updates on this near future :)
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.
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?
A dapp of any sufficient complexity will have bugs, some of which can probably be exercised to steal funds.
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.
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.
worried that loses the “trustless” of blockchain? hash the KYC entry and store it on chain so you make certain that the off-chain real world ownership information hasn’t been tampered with
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 a couple of new ones starting. Surely we must have more than enough by now?
EDIT: it's absurd that people continue to fall for this nonsense, but here we are, I guess.
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.
You can't buy crypto with fiat there, though, so connecting your orthodox bank accounts is irrelevant in this case. The founder said yesterday in an interview [1] that they may work with partners to enable this eventually, but so far I don't know any good decentralized exchanges that offer that. Buying crypto on a decentralized exchange with your bank account seems pointless to me - either buy it in cash or buy it on a safe platform (and then get it out immediately so they can't exit scam you or get hacked with your money).
Just curious, does anyone know of a kit like this for digital marketplaces for goods or services (not crypto)?
https:/www.originprotocol.com/creator
