AirSwap, a New York and Hong Kong-based decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, has announced its platform is going live on April 25, 2018.
Decentralized Exchange AirSwap Goes Live on April 25, 2018
Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange AirSwap is ready to go live after having refined its protocol, built the initial platform, and launched its token on February 1, 2018. The company’s vision of decentralization through peer-to-peer is set to go live on April 25, 2018.
AirSwap uses the blockchain technology to decentralize the three components of trade (custody, execution, and settlement) in order to remove the risk and limitation that centralized cryptocurrency exchanges carry.
“Our service is essentially a searchable bulletin board, that allows those looking to trade tokens to announce that they’re trading and where they can be found. Anyone can come in and take a look at the board, connect to a counter-party, and make a peer-to-peer trade”, says the announcement.
Decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges establish a secure, free-form network of liquidity provided by market makers, and connectivity provided by their search engine. Its properties include on-blockchain trade clearing, the ability for users to retain control of their funds, and hosting an order book in some decentralized manner.
The most obvious benefits to decentralized exchanges include giving users’ total control of their funds, removing the risk of exchange insolvency or hacking, and creating global order books. Also, decentralized exchanges do not require customers to sign up and provide personal information.
While they can’t directly access web-based centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized exchange protocols can call other smart contracts
It is expected that blockchain native dapps and scripts will eventually prefer peer-to-peer exchanges. Decentralized exchange protocols are open standards that allow for anyone to build on and customize, and automatically support new tokens.
The current negative aspects of decentralized exchanges include its low throughput and the scalability challenges associated with the underlying blockchains. Security is also an issue as these exchanges pass the responsibility to their users, but tools for that are still immature, according to Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, as he further explained its drawbacks.
“They currently offer little to no support for fiat currencies. They are probably challenging to deal with for regulated entities like traditional financial institutions. Finally, the lack of a block reward-like incentive supercharger in decentralized exchange protocols may make their network effects harder to get off the ground than in some other tokens. But most of these drawbacks can be overcome with time”, Fred Ehrsam added.
The New York and Hong-Kong based decentralized cryptocurrency exchange enables users to trade ERC20-compliant tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.