Token Trader Beta Guide

Published in

Fluidity

4 min readDec 12, 2017

Token Trader, the ShapeShift of Ethereum, is open for public beta on Rinkeby. Check it out at https://trade.airswap.io and let us know what you think.

Throughout our development process, we’ve been introducing more traders to our second product, the AirSwap Token Trader. We’re now ready and excited to share and collect feedback from the community. We’re looking forward to iterating and improving on it as we progress through the AirSwap Roadmap.

About Token Trader

Token Trader is a simple interface for making trades with a designated market maker. If you’ve used ShapeShift before, the interaction model is similar, where you’re trading something that you have, like AST, for something that the maker has, like ether. To learn more about the AirSwap Token Trader, check out the design post here.

We’ve built the app to focus on the core transaction on a decentralized marketplace: the trade. Doing so helps us build a trading environment that’s friendly for both traders and market makers, letting them do what they do best, and helping us bootstrap liquidity on the AirSwap network.

What you’ll need

Token Trader uses MetaMask to communicate with the Ethereum network.

The MetaMask plugin for Chrome with the Rinkeby network selected. If you do not have it installed, please do so and create or import an Ethereum account for it.
A balance of ether on the Rinkeby network. You can either ask one of our team members Telegram or get some of your own from a “faucet”. At time of writing, the faucet is unfortunately not working for Twitter.

Your mission: Make a trade

First, navigate to https://trade.airswap.io/ and confirm your account.
If you’d like to buy AST for ETH, you can do that out of the box. Try it out.
If you’d like to buy WETH for AST, you’ll need to approve the AirSwap exchange contract to trade your AST balance on your behalf. Once approved, try out a trade or two.

How it works

Confirm your account — This is done to confirm that you control the selected MetaMask account. What you’re doing is “signing” a piece of data which provides us with cryptographic proof that you are the owner without exposing your private key.
Request a quote — Once you’ve selected whether to buy AST or WETH, making changes to the on-screen amount will request new quotes from the maker backend.
Request an order — Once you’re happy with a quote, you can request and review an order. The order has not yet completed at this point. You can choose to complete it, cancel it, or let it expire.
Once your order is placed, you can check its status on Etherscan. You can request another order to continue to make trades.

Giving feedback

If you encounter bugs, imagine a way to improve the user experience, or have a feature request in mind, please let us know. On the frontend, you’ll find a “Feedback” button which you can click to provide us feedback inline. Otherwise, be sure to reach out to us on Twitter or Telegram.

FAQ

What is Rinkeby?

The Ethereum development community has a handful of “testnets” that run for the purposes of testing software without burning real ether. We’re running this on a network called Rinkeby, so the ETH and AST that you’re trading is for testing purposes only.

What is WETH?

WETH, or “wrapped ETH”, makes it possible to trade ether as if it were a standards-compliant ERC20 token. Ethereum-based token exchanges often depend on this standard to be able to interact with and transfer balances on your behalf.

Why do I have to “enable trading” for AST?

To safely transfer token balances between you and a counterparty, a smart contract is required to perform a swap where if one transfer fails, the entire transaction fails. This protects both counterparties. Therefore, you must approve the smart contract to perform this swap.

How do I track my token balances?

In MetaMask, you can track the balances you hold in both AST and WETH. In the main interface, select the “Tokens” tab, and click the “Add Token” button.

To track AST
Token Contract Address 0xcc1cbd4f67cceb7c001bd4adf98451237a193ff8

To track WETH
Token Contract Address 0x950c97E9F226b8362178D2eE0C9b362bD80fCFE9

What’s Next

We’re grateful to have a passionate group of community members who have been incredible in helping us grow. During the limited beta, they’ve identified bugs and improvements, and even posted about their experiences through screenshots and video. To those who participated, thank you for your contribution.

We’ll be running the open beta for some time while we prepare for release early next year on the Ethereum “mainnet”, where real trades can be made. Between now and then any and all feedback is welcomed. We greatly appreciate your support.

About AirSwap

AirSwap enables peer-to-peer trading on the Ethereum blockchain. Built on a decentralized protocol, traders can add or remove liquidity through a suite of trustless products that are easy to use and free. Our mission is to empower the world with frictionless trade.