Development Update — 003
An overview of key developments throughout the past month
It’s been a while since our last development update.
The summer months have been a busy time for our team with conferences around the world, new hires, the implementation of our new token listing policy and stress testing our trustless trading portal to the point where we are now ready to launch.
We apologise for the lack of updates of late and look forward to continuing down the path of an entirely community-run trading platform.
1. Launch of Ethfinex Portal
This week, our trustless portal will go live! This is an exciting moment for Ethfinex and one that the whole team has been working towards for a long time. We’ll begin slowly emailing users who signed up to receive first access. As we work to ensure an error-free experience for our users, we’ll look to gradually open up access to more and more people.
If you’re interested in being the first to try it out, please drop your email here.
A few hours ago we completed our first public demonstration of the non-custodial portal to an audience of developers at the Bitfinex hackathon. Thankfully the demo gods seemed to be on our side throughout the demonstration and we hope that this paves the way for a smooth rollout.
A little bit about the hackathon — we are joined by a fantastic group of developers all dedicated to building a decentralised future. In addition to sponsoring a 5,000 USD prize for teams making the best use of our self-custodial API, we’re spending the weekend learning from the likes of David Knott, Emil Bays and Serg Metelin.
Check out the #bitfinexhackathon hashtag wherever possible and stay tuned for upcoming videos!
2. Margin Markets
One thing that defines Ethfinex as a trading platform is our focus on catering to the needs of professional and careful traders. This is done in a number of ways, through the provision of a range of advanced order types, P2P funding features and not least margin markets.
Our focus over the past many months has strayed away from adding margin markets and we realise now the importance of this to our user base.
We’re happy to say that in the coming weeks we will be opening a larger selection of tokens up for margin trading & funding. Getting to this point has involved modelling the market dynamics and way that leveraged trading impacts volatility in order to ensure a ‘safe’ enabling of these markets.
3. Community Listing Votes
Currently all tokens listed on Ethfinex have been selected through our Ethereum based governance portal — nectar.community — allowing NEC holders to vote on the tokens which they’d like to see added to the exchange.
To date we’ve completed four rounds of voting, with 15 new tokens listed on our exchange through this method.
We’ve been asked about how tokens get selected to be part of the vote. We have an internal team that vets token project applications. We also survey the token landscape, looking to include highly innovative projects with engaged communities.
We have a handful of AMA’s planned with interesting projects throughout this space, with the goal of providing every project with ample opportunity to share their vision. The first one took place on a few days with Shingo Lavine, founder and CEO of Ethos — you can check it out here.
If you’re interested in taking part in this series please reach out to chris@ethfinex.com to get set up.
4. Nectar
Our goal with Ethfinex is to democratize the decision-making process behind a cryptocurrency exchange. We are a platform through which community members can submit proposals/vote on governance changes in real time, and our mission is ultimately to fully decentralize ownership of Ethfinex through Nectar (NEC).
Nectar tokens are the atomic unit for our platform. As we grow, we expect that more people will become interested in NEC as a means of owning a stake in how the exchange both operates and performs. Currently, NEC can be thought of as a rebate for market makers. Larger volume traders can benefit from negative real fees once the NEC rebate is taken into account (for more details email partners@ethfinex.com).
On top of this, we’ll shortly be expanding the Nectar model to increasingly revolve around governance decisions through the full implementation of our governance proposal system. Currently we have a few high-quality proposals pending community review. A personal favorite is the proposal to change the fee structure for NEC holders, rewarding token holders for the value they bring to Ethfinex. This, amongst many others proposals, will be opened up for voting in the coming weeks to ensure that the vision of our community is aligned with the development path we’re on.
The decentralisation of Ethfinex is a long-term project and will not happen overnight; however, the path that Ethfinex takes will ultimately be determined by those who closest to us — our traders.
