Why we believe in decentralized financial services
Unless you were so lucky to live on a Caribbean desert island for the last 8 years, most likely you already heard about blockchain and cryptocurrencies and you know that they come with the promise of greater autonomy and transparency. It seems that it’s time to turn the banking and financial world upside down for good.
More and more people have finally felt committed to invest some of their savings and figure out how to make them grow on their own, maybe inspired by some billionaire kid’s story.
Now the troubles starts. First of all you need to actually buy your first crypto using services like Coinbase that can exchange fiat (i.e. dollars or euros) to bitcoins for a fee and a conversion rate dramatically higher than the market price.
As a traditional centralised service, Coinbase doesn’t let you manage your private key: by storing all the data in their company servers, they basically own your wallet. They could even decide to disable your account for whatever reason and you won’t even be able to question it (as on this airbnb story here).
Despite Coinbase has one of the best ux around so far, the whole process of registration is still very tricky. This gives the idea of how far we have to go in order to build high quality, user friendly blockchain-backed products.
Because of KYC requirements you have to upload and trust them to manage your passport and other sensitive data despite the dozens of catastrophic hacks we assisted in the last years and the identity validation (to match your data and picture with the ones stated on your passport) that is buggy and can take very long time.
On top of that, their websites go often down so you cannot access your portfolio during critical moments (for example when you really need it) and an average withdraw takes usually days, sometimes even weeks.
They only support few coins, which could be a good way to start but for the actual trading you will need to move them on a real exchange platform (Poloniex, Binance and Bittrex to name a few) where you need to open an account, get verified and go through a similarly painful registration process once again.
In these platforms markets are limited to pre-fixed pairs of coins, allowing you to trade usually only against BTC, ETH and USDT. This forces you to make a number of unnecessary trades, especially considering that now there are over a thousand good coins available to exchange (just have a look at coinmarketcap).
Same as with Coinbase, their servers can go down for a significant period of time and you might miss a good opportunity to buy or sell, especially during the key moments in which the market signs “all time high or low” prices.
Despite this company makes billions in revenues every year, they’re selling low quality user experience and very hard to use products with usually little to no support, often not even tooltips or guided tours.
In the worst case they use some dark patterns where they trick you with unclear pricing so you risk to pay more than you should and you never feel fully confident about what you’re doing.
But it gets even worse. In fact your investment is not really safe as this platforms have been hacked repeatedly. We should already know that attackers can force their servers and steal all the wallet contained in once.
This is what happened with Mt. Gox, Bitfinex, BitGrail, Bithumb and several other major players in this space that lost already 15 billion dollars of your savings only in the last few years and counting.
All of this, the lack of transparency on fees, the downtimes, the bad user experience and poor security are consequences of the fact that these services have centralised infrastructures and governance.
This is why we created dexlab.io
We now have the technology to build fully de-centralised, secure and efficient services.
We are developing a mobile multi-coin wallet that will provide you with access to a broad range of financial services.
It’s going to be very intuitive, secure and fast, and it will not be necessary to open an account but just to download the app on your device and use it.
It will be possible to buy crypto with dollars, send and receive coins and track your portfolio value. We’re going to release a first version with Eth and ERC20 token support but we’re already planning to integrate more and more coins overtime.
One of the coolest features of the wallet is that it will be possible to send and receive messages using a public address in a chat-like interface, so for example vendors and shoppers could have a direct and secure channel of communication.
Moreover, we’re committed to designing the best fully decentralised crypto exchange platform in the world. We aim it to be easy, fast, secure and delightful to use.
The protocol agnostic architecture we’re working on is based on what we call GDEP a generalised decentralized exchange protocol that, once ready, it will allow us to interact with 0x, kyber network and loopring.
In this way, the user will be able to place custom orders outside the classic pairs of coins. We also intend to use a system of reserves to support volume and liquidity.
Building the exchange on a fully decentralised architecture is going to increase security by an order of magnitude. We will never store your private key therefore no hacker can penetrate our servers and steal all wallets and all your savings.
You will be able to simply attach your dexwallet to our exchange platform and enjoy a real peer-to-peer, trust-less, global marketplace.
