Announcing Atomic Bazaar
We’re proud to announce Atomic Bazaar, a new marketplace for buying, selling, and swapping NFTs.
Atomic Bazaar facilitates atomic trades of mixed sets of nonfungible tokens without relying on escrow. Each trade, no matter how many assets it contains, happens in a single on chain event. Because the transfers in each trade happen simultaneously, Atomic Bazaar protects both of the trade’s parties. Each trade either executes fully, or not at all.
For example, an Atomic Bazaar user might negotiate a trade of three CryptoKitties and a CryptoStriker for two Etheremon and a CryptoBot. Atomic Bazaar allows the traders to roll all of those transfers into a single peer to peer transaction. All seven token transfers happen in the same block.
Sellers on Atomic Bazaar can also list assets with a Buy It Now price, which allows buyers to purchase the listing using Dai. Employing Dai as a medium of exchange allows users to think in a familiar unit of account and, because it’s an ERC-20 compliant token, it works nicely with the underlying Atomic Bazaar protocol. Follow us for an elaboration on the subject of our use of Dai in a future post.
As collectors, we’ve cherished the true ownership of digital assets that Ethereum enables, but yearned for trustless, secure, programmable exchange. We needed to move NFTs in bulk and to swap one set for another. Atomic Bazaar answers these needs.
If you know what we mean and you’ve felt the same way, head straight to https://www.atomicbazaar.io/listings to get started. If you’ve collected and traded NFTs, then using Atomic Bazaar is the best way to learn about it. DM us on Twitter or click the chat button in the bottom right if you run into any issues. We’d love to talk.
What Is Atomic Bazaar?
Atomic Bazaar is a system for exchanging value on the Ethereum network. It allows users to quickly and cheaply trade what they have for what they want, without escrow and without liquidating into Ether first.
Atomic Bazaar takes advantage of the standard ERC-20 and ERC-721 interfaces to allow users to trustlessly swap heterogeneous sets of assets on both sides of a trade. A trade on Atomic Bazaar can include any number of assets — the only limit is the block gas limit — and it can contain any mix of supported tokens. This allows users to maintain control of their assets until the moment the trade is executed, at which point they gain control of their bargained-for assets.
The `Atomic` in Atomic Bazaar means atomic as in irreducible: no nuclear fission here. And it’s not a reference to cross chain swaps, which we don’t support yet. Rather, it’s a nod to the fact that the entire trade is the smallest event that can happen on the Atomic Bazaar protocol. There’s no way for half a trade to happen. The protocol just doesn’t allow it. Either the whole trade happens, or none of it does. No one is left empty handed.
The protocol underlying Atomic Bazaar is a set of smart contracts that serve to bake the various parts of a big, messy deal into a single transaction. It’s a flexible, futureproof, and modular approach; adding support for new types of assets in the future comes easily. Any application will be able to make use of the smart contracts and allow for trade to be a native feature. We’ll be releasing developer tools in the near future.
Atomic Bazaar is in mainnet Beta. The contracts are safe, tested, and audited internally. We’re in the formal audit process currently. But the front end is still fresh, raw, and a little buggy; Atomic Bazaar still needs work. We wanted to build and release a product that provides a lot of value to some users. Once we’ve reached that goal, we’re going to work relentlessly to create something that’s valuable to all users. #BUIDL
We plan to refine the user interface, expand support for other tokens, add auctions, and do our best to adapt to the needs and expectations of our users. We’re working on an embeddable Atomic Bazaar widget and we’re creating documentation for interfacing with our contracts directly. If you’d like to suggest a feature, our DMs are open.
Why Atomic Bazaar Is Important
Atomic Bazaar is the most powerful and flexible marketplace for NFTs. Atomic Bazaar allows a safe exchange of batches of Kitties for batches of Axies without the mental and economic transaction costs associated with using other marketplaces or native dapp marketplaces.
Imagine a version of eBay where a collector has to sell an entire stamp collection one stamp at a time. Users would demand a system that allows the sale of an entire stamp collection all at once. That’s Atomic Bazaar. But here, the stamps are nonfungible, interoperable, provably rare digital assets. Atomic Bazaar empowers influencers to sell curated collections, hoarders to swap their surplus cards for gap fillers, and Dapp developers to sell NFT starter packs. A winning Axie trainer might sell a team and its synergy for a sum greater than the listings parts, and an Etherbot can finally change hands all at once.
Ethereum enables true ownership of digital assets. But it allows for more than just scorekeeping in a token contract. It enables programmable ownership and exchange, shifting the burden of ensuring safe commercial transactions from a fallible system of wet code running on human brains to a digital system of dry code running on computers. We built Atomic Bazaar to bring the security, certainty, and efficiency of dry code to the world of exchanging NFTs.
By rolling up a big, messy, complicated deal into a single, clean, trust-minimized on chain event, Atomic Bazaar minimizes counterparty risk. There’s no chance for a user to get cold feet halfway through transferring a dozen promised (and paid for) assets. There’s no opportunity for a swindler to accept payment and then disappear without delivering the goods. The exchange of value happens concurrently with the acceptance of the offer.
We’re proud that our marketplace works without escrow. Escrow is a vestige of legacy finance, out of place in our new world, with negative consequences compounded by the new range of complications specific to crypto. Maintaining ownership of an asset while it’s listed for sale allows traders to avoid the attack surface added by an auction contract, escrow contract, or human escrow agent. Even assuming perfect good faith on compliance with duty from the escrow agent, avoiding escrow is desirable. Furthermore, an asset listed on Atomic Bazaar remains available to use in games that take advantage of blockchain’s famous interoperability, to produce profit, to use as collateral, and to list on other non-escrow exchanges for access to more liquidity.
Atomic Bazaar promotes a healthier, more efficient NFT ecosystem by facilitating low risk, low friction flow of value between owners of NFTs. Atomic Bazaar increases the liquidity of Ethereum assets by enabling complex trades; think of it like an exchange that allows users to create a currency pair out of any combination of NFTs. And Atomic Bazaar lowers the risks of entering into games like CryptoKitties and Etheremon by opening up more escape routes; a user can now end her relationship with CryptoKitties by trustlessly trading her entire Kitty collection for another user’s Etheremon collection in a single transaction.
We believe that we’re witnessing the beginning of an explosion in sound digital goods, and we’re excited to be a part of the infrastructure that catalyzes it.
I’m Ready. How Do I Get Started?
For a quick primer on using Atomic Bazaar, read our tutorial. If you’re ready to jump in, check out what’s available on Atomic Bazaar at https://www.atomicbazaar.io/listings or head to https://www.atomicbazaar.io/new-listing to create a listing of your own. If you’ve got questions, our DMs are open. If you’ve got suggestions, criticisms, or feature requests, post them in the comments below.
