Hi friend,
so you’ve stumbled across cryptocurrencies and want to finally get your feet wet and start trading some tokens. There are many options available to you, including Bitfinex, Poloniex, Binance (the list goes on). There are pros and cons for each, including deposit/withdrawal fees, simplicity of use, UI etc. You can find a full list of top volume exchanges here:
Almost all of these exchanges are centralized, meaning they run on servers and are for-profit companies. Centralized exchanges are great, however they are susceptible to third party interferences (i.e. governments like China *cough* *cough*). Also you are entirely dependent on said servers and company for all support issues, which may or may not be a good thing. At a certain point, it comes down to your individual ideologies on the topic.
Welcome to EtherDelta
What is EtherDelta? EtherDelta is essentially a decentralized trading platform for Ether and Ether based tokens (ERC20 tokens). So if you are familiar with tokens like Gnosis, Augur, etc, these are all Ether based tokens that run on the Ethereum blockchain.
Decentralized trading means that no single server or person owns the network or service. For example, if the core developer stepped away for one year from EtherDelta, the trading exchange would still operate. Maybe in a worse scenario, let’s say a few countries ban all cryptocurrency trading in an effort to centralize it, EtherDelta would still function and be available for use. This makes it an attractive option for future cryptocurrency trading as it provides two major benefits:
1: Magnitudes of lower trading fees compared to centralized exchanges
2: Persistence
Now that you are up to speed on EtherDelta as a service, let’s cover the steps necessary to get your tokens onto EtherDelta and start trading.
Step 1: Correct Site
Go to https://etherdelta.com/. There are a few scammers who have variations of this URL — DO NOT go to those sites. If you give them your wallet info, they can login in using your private/public key and steal your tokens.
Step 2: Import/Create Wallet
To fund your account, you will need to go to top right corner of EtherDelta and select “Select Account”.
In this dropdown menu, you can create a new account (Ether Address Wallet) or import an existing one (including MetaMask). There’s not really a difference between the two, but I’d recommend to keep your wallets separate, to create a new account and send some Ether from your other wallet to the new EtherDelta wallet. If you don’t know how to send Ether, consult this video.
Step 3: Verify Wallet Add
Before you start trading, be sure that you wallet is correctly linked up. You can verify that your ether address has a balance by checking the top right corner. In my case, it shows my imported Ether wallet address, the wallet’s ether balance and also where it is from (in my case MetaMask). You can further verify by going to the top left corner of the screen to the control panel where you can see “deposit”, “withdrawal”, “token”, “wallet” etc.
For this, focus on “wallet”. Click on it and you should be able to see your linked wallet’s ether balance.
If you don’t have enough Ether in your wallet, I’d recommend going to Coinbase or Kraken to buy some with a credit card or bank transfer. If you use a credit card on Coinbase, you can buy Ether instantly (less than 30 seconds). After you have that, you can deposit it to your EtherDelta account by clicking “deposit” under the “ETH” heading. After a few block confirmations, you should be credited with the amount of Ether you bought minus the gas fees from Ethereum miners.
Step 4: Buy/Sell Tokens
Now that you have Ether in your account, it is possible to start trading and buy/selling tokens. Find on the upper left corner near the EtherDelta logo a dropdown menu. If you click on it, there should be a menu with many 3–4 letter combinations. These are tokens. You can find the one you are interested in, for example 1st (FirstBlood). Once you click on it, you will be redirected to a page that trades FirstBlood tokens.
To execute a buy/sell order, simply find the module that says “New Order” listed in the middle bottom half of the screen. Here, you can click on the “Buy” tab to buy FirstBlood tokens, or the “Sell” tab to sell FirstBlood tokens.
You want to type a quantity of FirstBlood tokens to buy/sell (divisible by 8 decimal points), the price you want to buy/sell at (in terms of FirstBlood/ETH) and the corresponding amount of Ether you would need to buy/sell for this order. Expires simply denotes the number of blocks to wait until the order is canceled. Don’t worry too much about this as for most orders, it is negligible.
Step 5: Wait for order to execute
So now, if you put in a sell/buy order, you can wait for it to execute, meaning someone agrees to buy your sell order, or sell on your buy order. If they do this, you are not charged a fee.
You can also buy/sell off the order book (off other people’s orders). The advantage of this is that the order executes instantly, but you are charged a 0.3% service fee, paid to the EtherDelta developers.
Step 6: Rinse & Repeat (+ Misc)
You can repeat this process over and over again, as is the nature of trading. If you traded all your Ethereum tokens for FirstBlood tokens, you can see the balance again on the upper left corner in the “wallet” section. You can also choose to withdraw them to an ethereum wallet that supports ERC20 tokens (like MyEtherWallet). Or if you trust EtherDelta (which you should), you can simply leave them on the exchange. The benefits of leaving them on the exchange are that you have easy access to your tokens as well as liquidity.
Summary
That’s really all there is to trading on EtherDelta. If you have any more questions or feedback, please comment on this post and I’m happy to answer them. If you liked this article or thought it was useful, please feel free to share.
Trading is a lot of a fun (and can be profitable), but setting up the environment can be a pain in the ass. Hopefully this article helped guide the beginners to the steps of setting up EtherDelta!
*post made for EtherDelta ledger giveaway — 10/9/17*
