Blockchain Thought Leaders — Feature 1
Blockchain thought leaders is a new series where I speak to pioneers working in the blockchain space to learn their thoughts. The series is mostly technology focused, and tries to help developers get to know more about the various blockchain products and how they work.
The first blockchain thought leader I am featuring is Suchit Gupta. He got started with blockchains by building a proof-of-concept for a private and permissioned blockchain early last year, and hasn’t looked back since. He has hosted ethereum developer meetups, mastered the 0x protocol and has been working as a blockchain engineer on an interesting product called Shark Relay.
About Shark Relay
Shark Relay provides a user friendly interface to facilitate peer-to-peer token exchange via commonly used browser interfaces. It aims to build an entire suite of decentralized financial applications for trading tokens, futures, options and short-selling etc. Currently, it has a live product where users can buy and sell Ethereum based tokens.
Technology behind Shark Relay
Shark Relay utilizes the 0x protocol and is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
It is a non-custodial exchange, i.e. one that does not hold any tokens or any user information by itself. It simply acts as an interface to enable transactions to occur between users.
The transactions on the platform are atomic, meaning that the money is deducted from sellers account and added to buyer’s account at exactly the same time. This adds a layer of security to the transactions.
How does this work?
When a user wants to trade a token, they will create and place an order saying that they want to either BUY or SELL a token for certain price. This order is placed in Shark Relay’s order book (that acts like a bulletin board — think of ‘Craigslist’), where another user just like yourself can find and submit your open order to Ethereum blockchain to complete the transaction.
E.g. I want to sell 20 ZRX tokens for 1.5 DAI each. I would make an open SELL order on Shark Relay and sign it with my metamask wallet account. Order is then placed in the ZRX/DAI order book. Another user who wishes to BUY 20 ZRX for 1.5 DAI, can take my order and fill it by submitting my order to Ethereum blockchain for final settlement. This final settlement occurs atomically within the 0x smart contract, where funds are deduced from seller’s account at the same time as they are added to buyer’s account.
That’s great, and there must be a lot of people using the platform. How does Shark Relay handle large volumes of transactions?
As we know, Ethereum is pretty slow at the moment and it’s very difficult to do anything more than 20 transactions per seconds on the platform. Suchit is hoping that Ethereum will move to proof-of-stake as he believes that would help in resolving the scalability issues immensely.
So currently while the base ethereum layer scalability is being worked on, Shark Relay is scaling its platform using state channels. It utilizes the state channels within 0x protocol. Things like users posting trade orders are done off-chain (via state-channels) and the final settlement for the sellers and buyers is done on the ethereum main-chain. This increases the number of overall transactions that can be done on Shark Relay as only the final transactions need to be verified on the main ethereum, and the rest can be handled off-chain.
The technology behind it sounds well built. What is the Shark Relay team currently working on?
- Updated stack — Version 2 of the 0x protocol:
A major additional feature would be that users will be able to trade ERC 721 (Non-fungible tokens/crypto-collectibles) on the platform.
2. Better On-boarding for Users:
As we know, the user on-boarding experience is a major hurdle for adoption of blockchain applications today as users have to go through a long process to start trading cryptocurrencies, like first learning how to set up a wallet, then buying known currencies and only then converting to other cryptocurrencies etc. Shark Relay is adding a feature to its platform to address this challenge.
In a few months from now, users will be able to directly transfer money from their bank accounts to their ethereum wallets for trading.
How will this work?
In order to be able to take advantage of withdrawing and depositing money directly from their bank accounts and ethereum wallets, users will need to verify themselves on Shark Relay.
Users can simply hover human icon and select to verify themselves. On clicking “verify yourself”, the user will be able to submit her bank account details, photo ID, SSN etc. to verify her identity and connect her bank account to her ethereum wallet address. This will be a one-time process and be handled by an application called Sendwyre, a registered money service business. No user information will be stored by Shark Relay, and once the verification via Sendwyre is complete, a compliance token (Non-fungible token) will be issued to the users wallet address in order to identify her. The user can then simply use their verified wallet to deposit and withdraw from their accounts and conduct compliant cryptocurrency transactions.
It’s great that progress is being made to improve blockchain applications. However, the prices for bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies are currently falling. Why is that happening?
According to Suchit, prices are falling but that doesn’t actually reflect what’s going on in the industry. The network volume on major blockchains and the interest in the space has only been growing. Also, the number of people trading and the value of trades being conducted on Shark Relay’s platform has also been increasing.
Suchit believes the market is just in a correction mode for cryptocurrencies right now. Prices for ethereum were $10–15 in early 2017 and in just 1 year, they reached $700–800 and now are falling back to $200. This is just a market correction.
He believes that the immense amount of development being done on blockchains will provide a lot of value to cryptocurrencies in the long run. Once secure and scalable decentralized applications are built, with users frequently using them, the prices of cryptocurrencies will reach new highs, breaking even previous highs.
That’s great and the blockchain community is excited to see what’s to come from all the blockchain projects and with Shark Relay. Can the community provide anything to Shark Relay?
Shark Relay is currently looking for technical engineers and a community manager to help build out new features and support. Primarily back-end developers with C++ or Java Knowledge, or anyone with a programming background and crypto knowledge.
Thank you for reading.
Feel free to contact me if you want to connect with Suchit, share your thoughts about blockchain, connect with opportunities in the space or get input/advice on blockchain projects.
My Email: anushajain.blockchain@gmail.com
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