Beta testing a DAPP on the live Ethereum network.
For the past week we have been running Ethex on the live network. I thought I’d share what we discovered during this first week.
Ethex is extremely efficent
We do not require you to use any type of special token or sign messages to use Ethex. It’s extremely simple to trade tokens. Furthermore using the Ethereum blockchain has been flexible and practical. Traders are simply calling function on our smart contract using the Ethex UI.
Take a look at this transaction. Two traders exchanged 1000 tokens for 0.05 Ether. This transaction only cost the buyer 4 cents. I did not expect to see blockchain fees that low! Both traders were able to verify funds the entire time and transact in a trustless way. On our end we didn’t have to pay middle men, or even server costs. This efficiency and blockchain based regulation is part of the reason DAPPS like Ethex are revolutionary.
ERC20 has variations
When you interact with ERC20 tokens you are interacting with a smart contract. Each token is a unique contract and although many follow a standard, there are differences.
Some tokens don’t support all the typical functions. Some contracts require you to ‘allow zero’ before setting a new allowance. Some contracts require you to call special functions to increase or decrease allowances.
Because we want to support as many tokens as possible we have been working to detect these variations. It turns out in Ethereum you can download the ERC20 binary contract code from the blockchain and check for method signatures. In many languages this is called introspection. It allows our DAPP to determine which variance of ERC20 you are trading and call the proper methods.
In the end the Trader is ultimately responsible for having some understanding of the contract they are interacting with just like investors have to understand their classic contracts. However we are doing work on our end to present a constant interface and make things as easy as possible without favoring or hardcoding specific tokens. We want to remain distributed and accomplish as much as possible using the blockchain.
Beyond our first 100 transactions
The Ethex contract has completed a few Ether worth of trades. These are real trades occurring on the blockchain between people who probably do not know or trust each other. These trades happened transparently and with far fewer steps and fees then existing systems. Our first 7 days of testing has been a success so far. We have plenty of work left to do and some announcements incoming. Sign up to get the very latest info about Ethex and our upcoming Supporter Token.
