Trading Ethereum Tokens on RadarRelay
A walkthru for trading the Bloom token (or any others)
Below is an example of how to trade ERC-20 tokens on RadarRelay. It’s a decentralized token transfer service that operates using the 0x protocol, which means you trade tokens directly from your wallet. No need to deposit to an exchange wallet first (although there are still a few steps to follow before trading begins).
In this example, we’ll be trading the Bloom Token (BLT), and using a Limit Order to set our own price and wait for it to be filled, rather than a Market Order which will take the best price available for buying or selling. A brief overview of market orders is included at the end of the article.
You will also need MetaMask installed with at least $20 — $50 of ETH, and some BLT tokens to sell. To get a MetaMask wallet set up, visit https://metamask.io/. If you need to transfer ETH and tokens from MyEtherWallet, see the instructions on their site.
Head over to https://app.radarrelay.com to get started, and type the name of the token you wish to trade into the search box in the Marketplace tab.
To Sell Tokens
Before buying or selling any type of token, you first need to enable trading from your MetaMask wallet in RadarRelay. Do this by clicking the Open Wallet sidebar, and then clicking the slider in the BLOOM section of the Your Tokens tab.
Clicking the slider will open a MetaMask transaction dialog. Ensure your gas price is set high enough to confirm within a reasonable time. To check gas prices and transaction times, go to https://ethgasstation.info/, or increase the recommended gas price by 1 or 2 GWEI. Click SUBMIT to confirm the transaction.
Open MetaMask to see the status of your transaction. It should be the first one with a “…” next to it. Click the “…” to open etherscan.io to check the status of your transaction.
When the transaction completes, the switch will turn green.
Now it’s time to sell!
A Market Order will sell your token at the highest bid price. In the screenshot below, that would be 0.00150 ETH. That’s not a very good price, so a limit order might be more appropriate. This will allow you to put a sell order (or ask) in the order book, so someone else can buy your BLT in the future for a price you specify (hopefully soon!).
In the Limit Order tab, enter the amount of BLT you want to sell (it must be equal or lower than the amount you have in your wallet). Then enter the price in ETH you want to sell. In the screenshot below, I want to sell 50 BLT for 0.0016 ETH/BLT, which will earn me a total of 0.08 ETH. The “W” in front of ETH means “Wrapped” ETH. See the explanation for WETH here: https://weth.io/
Click the PLACE SELL ORDER button, and then choose how long you want your sell order to be active. I chose 1 week, which means my offer will be on the books for up to one week if nobody buys my BLT at the price I specify. Then click CONTINUE.
MetaMask will pop up again and ask you to sign a message. It might give you a nasty message about danger. Don’t worry, this will be fixed in a future release of MetaMask. Click Sign and wait for the transaction to complete.
You should see a message stating your order is now “on the radar.”
Click View Order to see the details of your order.
If you look at the order book, you should also see your order in the “ASK” section (the top portion of the order book). It will have a green icon next to it.
Now you wait! If the price of BLT increases, someone will fill your order, and you will receive WETH in return for your BLT. In order to convert the WETH to real ETH and make it available in your MetaMask wallet for spending elsewhere, simply unwrap the ETH by clicking UNWRAP in the ETH box, entering the amount you want to unwrap, then click UNWRAP. You will need to sign the transaction with MetaMask, and then your ETH will be back in your wallet.
To Buy
Buying BLT is very similar to selling, but instead of putting a sell order with BLT in the order book, you put a buy order (or “bid”) in the order book using WETH. In order to get some WETH to buy BLT, simply click the WRAP button, and choose the amount of ETH you want to use for trading. Sign the order, and you should see your WETH balance increase.
To start the buying process, click the Limit Order tab, and then click the Buy tab underneath. Enter the amount of BLT you wish to buy, and the price in ETH that you want to pay. For example, I want to buy 1 BLT for 0.00151 ETH.
Click the PLACE BUY ORDER button, and submit the transaction using the MetaMask dialog box (remember to set an appropriate gas price). When the transaction completes on the Ethereum blockchain, you will see an Order Pending screen.
Again, you will be able to see your order in the order book, but this time in the bottom section with all the other buy orders. When someone wants to pay the price you are asking, the sale will complete, and you will receive BLT in your wallet (no need to “unwrap” ERC-20 tokens, they are in MetaMask ready to go).
Market Orders
A market order is even simpler than a limit order, in that it executes right away so you don’t have to wait for someone to buy your BLT, or sell you BLT at the price you are asking. Instead, you buy BLT at the lowest price offered in the sell orders, or sell BLT to the highest offer in the buy order section.
In the example below, selling 5 BLT with a market order will set a price of 0.0015 ETH/BLT for a total of 0.0075 ETH, because two people are willing to buy BLT at that price (197.97 BLT, and 87.73 BLT). If I want to sell more than 285.7 BLT (197.97 + 87.73), then the matching engine will sell 285.7 BLT at 0.00500, and then sell some more at 0.001423 because that is the next best available price.
If I want to buy 0.05 ETH worth of BLT, then I put that amount in the Buy box, and click BUY BLT. This will purchase 31.0019841 BLT, because there are over 621 BLT for sale at a price of 0.0016128 ETH/BLT. If I want more than 621.96 BLT, then I will have to buy all of those, and then pay 0.0016512 ETH/BLT for up to 3850 more BLT.
Market orders also require MetaMask transactions, which cost gas. Right now, the Ethereum network is very popular and busy, so gas is expensive. Hopefully someday soon it will get cheaper so transactions on RadarRelay will be a few cents rather than a few dollars.
