A tour of the e-Money DEX

The bread and butter of e-Money continues to be our currency-backed, interest-bearing tokens.

To maximise the utility of our tokens, we are introducing a new DEX into the Cosmos ecosystem, boosting the utility of our tokens while offering a valuable service to the community.

It is designed from the group up to ensure a superior trading experience:

• No execution fees are charged on trades. Only transaction fees are paid.
• Transaction fees can be paid in any token, not just our staking token (NGM).
• There are no listing requirements. Any token is immediately tradable, including those transferred via IBC.
• Optimised for liquidity. A single token balance can be sold in multiple orders, with remaining orders being automatically adjusted on execution.
• Sophisticated order matching allows a single order to trade through multiple instruments. This ensures that trades always execute at the best possible price.
• On-demand block generation ensures transactions are quickly finalised.

There is a classic saying that a GIF says more than a thousand words. In that spirit, we hope you’ll enjoy this quick tour!

Let’s start with the cast of characters: Alice, Bob and Carlo — Carols younger brother. Each of them wants to exchange their tokens to something else.

Alice places an order to exchange eeur tokens for echf:

After adding the order, Alice’s account balance is unchanged because the order is not yet filled. No tokens are locked up and only the transaction fees were deducted.

Further, there was no initial listing process before placing the order: The DEX creates the required eeur→echf instrument after verifying that Alice has a sufficient balance and that echf is a known denomination.

Independently of Alice, Bob has decided to exchange some echf→eusd:

Did you notice how quickly the order was added? The on-demand block generation ensures that transactions are finalised in approximately 500ms.

Unfortunately Alice and Bob’s orders can’t be matched, as they are for different instruments. Enter Carlo, looking to exchange eusd→eeur.

As we can see below, Carlo’s order is immediately matched against those of Alice and Bob. It first matches with Bob (eusd→echf) and then proceeds to match the received echf with Alice (echf→eeur).

Carlo never notices that his order traded through an unrelated token. The matching engine also ensures that Carlo doesn’t end up with any unwanted echf.

In case there were a better direct price (eeur→eusd) in the market, Carlo’s order would have been matched with that. The matching engine ensures that trades always occur at the best available price, be it directly or via multiple instruments.

We can now see that all three participants have had their orders filled and any remaining orders have been updated:

In closing, the above demonstrates the core functionality of the e-Money DEX using the command-line tools.

We will obviously be working on providing a web-based user interface similar to what people have come to expect, and are working with web and mobile wallet providers to ensure integration of our exchange functionality.