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How to use CryptorDex (DEX)

Tools you need to use the DEX

You need ether (ETH) and wrapped Ether (wETH) to buy & sell on the DEX exchange, as ETH and wETH is how you pay for transactions. Learn more about wrapped tokens here. You also need an ERC20 compatible wallet in order to use the DEX. We recommend Metamask.

Log into your wallet and connect it to the DEX by clicking on your wallet address that should occur in the menu at top right corner of the DEX. (Note: You need to be logged into your wallet in order to use the DEX.) You will then get a new menu, at the top of the menu click on “my wallet”. You should now see the listed tokens and your holdings of each of them.

If you already have ETH and wETH in your wallet, you are already set to begin. If not, this guide will explain how to buy both ETH and wETH under.

You are now ready to do transactions like buying and selling tokens on the DEX.

How to Unlock tokens in your wallet

You will need to unlock the token you want to sell or use as payment in a swap, so the system can take it from your wallet. On the 3rd row in the menu from the right you have “Locked?”. Click on the “lock” symbol beside the token you want to unlock. Your wallet will ask for a confirmation of the unlock, and you will need to confirm in order to complete the unlock. The lock symbol should now disappear from that token.

How to buy / sell ETH and wETH

If you have ETH, you can then buy wETH on the DEX by converting ETH to wETH by using the mall menu that now should be present up in the top left corner of the DEX. 1 wETH has the same value as 1 ETH. fill out how many ETH you want to convert to wETH, it will then give you the total transaction value including commission. Complete the transaction by clicking on “convert’. If you have wETH you can also convert to ETH using this menu.

How to send tokens

On the right side you have buttons for sending tokens or buying tokens. If you want to send some of your BIB tokens to another wallet, click the “send” button beside your holding of BIB tokens, and you get up a small form where you fill out the address of the wallet you want to send your BIB token, as well as the number of BIB tokens you want to send. The necessary ETH gas will be taken from your wallet when you initiate the transaction.

How to buy tokens

If you want to buy tokens click on the “buy” button beside the tokens listed that you want to buy, you will then get up a small form where you fill out the order details like the number of tokens you want to buy. To complete the transaction click on the “buy” button at the bottom of the form.

How to swap tokens and tokens that are listed on the exchange?

On the menu up in the top right corner click on “swap”. You get a new screen where you can swap ETH with any of the tokens. Select the token you want to swap buy using the menu up in the top left corner. A small form in the middle of the screen shows the price used and how many tokens you get for the swap. Fill out how many tokens you want to send, and the number of tokens you receive will occur on the form. Click “swap” to complete the transaction.

Decentralized Finance (DEFI)

On the menu up in the top right corner click on “DEFI” and you get up a new screen with options to borrow tokens and put up tokens as collateral, giving you the possibility to leverage your trade. Unless you are a skilled trader, we do not recommend that you use leverage in your trading. 

Price chart of your token

Click on “CryptorDEX” up in the top right corner and you get a screen of the listed tokens. Click on the token you want displayed with a price chart. You will then get a price chart covering the last 3 months of trading.

Over the price chart you have a menu with the following items Day, Candles, Compare, and Indicators (Technical Indicators).

Technical Indicators

Click on “Indicators” if you want to select the technical indicators to use in order to analyze the price chart like “accumulation / distribution”, “average true range”, etc. in alphabetic order. Search for the indicator you are looking for like RSI (Relative Strength Indicator”. You can learn more about technical indicators used for analyzing price structure on our investment website Elliott Wave Technician here.

Buy or Sell tokens

On the right side at the bottom, you should now see a form where you can initiate a “buy” or “sell” transaction for the token you look at in the price chart. The current order book / transactions occurs in the top half of the form.

In the form for ‘buy’ and “sell” orders, fill out the number of tokens you want to buy or sell, and the price in ETH. The calculated price should now occur at the bottom line. Remember to choose if you order is at “market” or on “limit”.

Market orders allow you to trade a token for the going price, while limit orders allow you to name your price. However, remember that newly listed tokens has yet to establish a market and the liquidity is low, then prices can swing widely. In this case use “limit” in order to control the price you buy or sell for. Click on the buy / sell button to complete the transaction. Remember if you are buying using ETH to pay, ETH need to be unlocked in your wallet before you initiate the transaction. If you are selling a token it needs to be unlocked before you can initiate a sell transactions.

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Overview of wrapped tokens

Description of wrapped token

A wrapped token is an asset hosted on the Ethereum blockchain with a price that is the same as another underlying asset, even if it’s not on the same blockchain or on a blockchain at all.

A wrapped token is an ERC-20 compatible token with a value identical to another asset that it represents, either through a smart contract or by being backed one-to-one with the underlying asset. 

Wrapped Bitcoin, for instance, is a token worth the same as one BTC at any given moment, as a smart contract algorithm reproduces its price in real time and regulates the underlying fund with supply and demand information gleaned from user transactions. In exchange for their money, wrapped token users get an equivalent amount of value “wrapped up” in an asset that’s more easily mobilized by decentralized applications (DApps).

Wrapped Ether, is a token worth the same as one ETH.

Types of wrapped tokens ?

Because Ethereum is the biggest DeFi ecosystem, wrapped tokens are often those hosted on other blockchains but are also stablecoins that are pegged to the dollar.

Many of the first wrapped assets were, in fact, fiat-backed stablecoins, such as tokens with prices pegged to the dollar — Tether, Coinbase’s USDC or TrueUSD. There are also euro, yen, yuan and countless other fiat stablecoins that are mostly based on the Ethereum blockchain. 

The Wrapped Zcash token (coming), a privacy coin, will provide Ethereum DApp users with the coin’s anonymity advantages, plus a reliable way to invest in Zcoin, thereby boosting its market.

Wrapped Zcash is a way for Zcash to be used within financial applications built on Ethereum — it opens a bridge from one ecosystem to the other. This two-way street benefits both Zcash and Ethereum users, as Zcash users are able to transact and invest within the many decentralized financial applications built on ETH.

This integration also brings an effect on the supply and demand for Zcash, which could prove a significant tailwind. For Ethereum users, the privacy benefits of Zcash enabled by its z-addresses and t-addresses provide new ways for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications to limit the publication of identifying information held in transaction data while still passing auditory and compliance standards.

These are backed accordingly via the reserves, with coins fed in according to the demand of online crypto exchanges and larger institutional investors who want to quickly exchange fiat money into crypto and manage their money within a given platform. This makes it as easy to deposit dollars into DeFi applications and blockchain wallets as it does to have a reliable counter currency providing traders relief from crypto asset volatility.

Blockchain interoperability

Other cryptocurrencies are beginning to launch wrapped versions of their tokens on Ethereum in larger numbers, with interoperability (The ability to share information across different blockchain networks, without restrictions) a vital consideration for solutions that want to be taken seriously.

Currently, one blockchain has no knowledge of information that might exist in a different blockchain. For instance, the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain exists fully independently of the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain — in the sense that it has no knowledge of any information recorded there — and vice versa. Blockchain-based projects are isolated from each other, despite existing within the same industry and working with the same technology.

The crypto industry involves “a series of unconnected systems operating alongside, but walled from each other”. Blockchain interoperability is the ability to exchange data between different blockchains seamlessly, as if there were no boundaries.

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Decentralized Exchanges

Created in 2008 by the pseudonymous computer programmer Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin is digital money that’s tracked via a public ledger and controlled by no central bank, corporation, or individual.

Image courtesy of Wiki Commons

It’s a peer-to-peer currency based on the blockchain running on the internet that allows its users to transfer value with no central authority or third party involved. Since a network of distributed and mostly anonymous miners are all in charge of processing the transactions, we avoid problems like censorship and fraud.

The automated issuance mechanism of bitcoin through mining also seeks to remove the control of money printing from privately owned banks that lend money to the public at an interest, creating the debt based economy. The primary goal of Bitcoin, to return the control of money to its owners, is in a way lost with third party services.

With cryptocurrencies comes the need for exchanges, and centralized exchanges are easy to use, easy to access, and they provide advanced trading functionalities like margin trading and others.

However, they also represent a security risk for your funds. While some exchanges are better guarded than others, hacks are not an uncommon. There are a number or risks related to centralized exchanges like incompetence, bankruptcy, etc.

We need to exchange our currencies. There are certain items and services that we cannot buy with Bitcoin and in order to acquire Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, most people have to exchange it for a national currency. Furthermore, some cryptocurrencies like Ether or Bitshares have special features or tools that are not present in Bitcoin. So how can we exchange our coins without entrusting them to a third party service? The answer lies with decentralized exchanges.

Image courtesy Wiki Commons

Decentralized Exchanges

A decentralized exchange is an exchange market that does not rely on a third party service to hold the customer’s funds. Instead, trades occur directly between users (peer to peer) through an automated process. This system can be achieved by creating proxy tokens (crypto assets that represent a certain fiat or crypto currency) or assets (that can represent shares in a company for example) or through a decentralized multi-signature escrow system, among other solutions.

This is an alternative to the current centralized model in which users deposit their funds and the exchange issues an IOU that can be freely traded on the platform. When a user asks to withdraw his funds, these are converted back into the cryptocurrency they represent and sent to their owner.

Advantages

The most important benefit to using a decentralized exchange over a centralized one is their “trustless” nature. You are not required to trust the security or honesty of the exchange since the funds are held by you in your personal wallet and not by a third party.

Another advantage to the decentralized model is the privacy it provides. Users are not required to disclose their personal details to anyone, except if the exchange method involves bank transfers, in which case your identity is revealed only to the person that is selling or buying from you.

In addition, the hosting of decentralized exchanges is distributed through nodes meaning that there is no risk of server downtime. To summarize,

  • No parenting by governments, banks and other institutions
  • Secure, no 3rd party involved
  • Set the unbanked free
  • Open, Transparent
  • Global, fast, efficient, 24/7
  • No identity theft
  • A platform for innovation

Disadvantages

Some decentralized exchanges require users to be online in order for an order to be listed and for the trade to take place, requiring users to perform certain actions like signaling that a payment was received.

Trading features like margin trading, lending and stop loss are currently not available in the decentralized model as they only allow the basic exchange of currency for a predetermined value.

Overview of decentralized exchanges

While there is still a way to go in order to build fully functional and convenient decentralized exchanges, there are several projects that have brought us the basic functions and an alternative way to trade currencies while keeping your funds safe from hacks, inside thefts and faulty business models.

Bitsquare is a decentralized open-source exchange that allows users to buy and sell Bitcoin for cryptocurrencies and national currencies without the need to entrust funds to third-party or middleman, meaning that the transactions occur directly between the buyer and seller. Bitsquare relies on a decentralized multi-signature escrow system to ensure that all trades are carried out honestly.

CounterParty is a meta-coin smart contract layer that embeds data into regular Bitcoin transactions. It allows anyone to issue assets or tokens inside of the Bitcoin blockchain. When trading assets for other assets, the Counterparty protocol acts as a decentralized escrow service that holds the funds until the orders are matched. When trading an asset for Bitcoin, the asset is held in escrow and the other user must make a manual bitcoin payment using the Counterparty wallet.

Waveplatform Waves Asset Exchange is allowing users to trade assets (including asset-to-asset exchange), fiat tokens, and cryptocurrencies.

Bitshares is a crypto platform with its own native currency, Bitshares. Using the Bitshares platform, users can trade BTS, Market Pegged Assets (a crypto asset pegged to another currency or commodity that always has 100% or more of its value backed by the BitShares core currency, to which they can be converted at any time) and User Issued Assets (assets that can be issued by anyone to represent shares, commodities, currencies and so on). Openledger is the Web-based version of Bitshares, running on the same underlying blockchain.

Nxt is a crypto platform (one of the first crypto 2.0 projects) that allows users to issue and trade assets. These assets, however, can only be exchanged for the coin NXT and not for other cryptocurrencies.

Komodo EasyDEX exchange will allow users to trade cryptocurrencies directly without resorting to proxy tokens, while the PAX (Pegged Asset Exchange), both being developed by the SuperNET and Komodo teams, allows users to exchange national currency assets with the privacy that zero-knowledge proofs provide.

Stashcrypto is built on the Open-Transactions financial cryptography platform, an extremely fast and low cost off-blockchain system based on signed receipts. When combined with Bitcoin, OT solves hard problems in crypto finance. Receipts in OT cannot be forged, and a user’s balance cannot be changed without his signature. OT is also able to prove all balances, as well as which instruments are still valid, without storing any history except for the last signed receipt.

Cryptor Trust is working on the CryptorDex, an open decentralized distributed platform for trading securities. Cryptor Trust plan to list their own investment entities on the CryptorDex exchange.

Conclusion

Decentralized exchanges provide global, frictionless value-transfers. Without decentralized exchanges, there will be intermediaries having control over the transfer of value.

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