Why Be a Maker on AirSwap?

Published in

Fluidity

5 min readDec 10, 2019

Find out why makers prefer AirSwap over the alternatives. With no trading fees, no deposits, and no costly price updates to on-chain order books, AirSwap is a flexible and efficient network full of opportunities.

Blockchain technology aims to remove centralized parties and give control to individuals, but many crypto-assets continue to be traded on highly-centralized and often risky services. Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are easy (and frequent) targets for hackers — the most recent UpBit hack in November 2019 led to a loss of $50M of user funds.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) is a solution. AirSwap is one of the earliest decentralized trading networks built on Ethereum, with security as a first-class priority from day one. DEX activity has been consistently growing and is now an essential player when it comes to trading tokens with around 12M total trades and $50M USD weekly volume.

AirSwap in particular works with a “request for quotation” (RFQ) model, where each user selects a token and amount to buy or sell and receives price quotes from makers on the network. To be visible to these users, makers simply stake AirSwap Token (AST) to an “indexer” contract that includes the location of their pricing strategies. It’s easy to get started, more on that below.

Key Benefits of AirSwap

Because AirSwap is peer-to-peer, it is secure and flexible from the ground up. There is no token listing process, no deposits as it is non-custodial, no trading fees, with full control over pricing.

1. Be a maker for any token*

For makers, one of the biggest pain points is limited available assets, especially when they’re new or less-liquid. An exchange will often demand a listing fee in order for a new token to be tradable, with fees ranging from $50,000 to $1 million.

Because it’s peer-to-peer, AirSwap doesn’t have a listing process, which means tokens are available without third party agreements or fees. Each maker simply stakes an “intent to trade”, which is a signal to other peers to contact them.

2. Maintain custody over your assets

Keeping crypto assets on exchanges is a counterparty risk for makers. Are you willing to keep your inventory on an exchange knowing your funds can disappear at any time? On AirSwap, this isn’t an issue. Makers can post prices and trade while maintaining full control of their assets at all times. In addition to having full control, the security of the network is a high priority, with AirSwap being named the #1 safest DEX.

3. Don’t pay any fees

There are three kinds of fees traders typically incur: exchange trading fees, deposit and withdrawal fees, and blockchain transaction fees. Exchange trading fees are calculated as a percentage of your trade (maker order fees are about 0.2%); many exchanges will provide variable fee structures that change depending on trading volume. Deposit and withdrawal fees are often charged by a percentage of the amount or a fixed fee (often around $5 value). Blockchain transactions are performed by decentralized miners, who are paid a computation fee (gas) by users on the front end.

On AirSwap, there are no trading fees, deposits, or withdrawals — and for makers, no blockchain transaction fees either.

4. Stay in control of pricing strategy

There are DEXs that use smart-contract-based liquidity pools, with tokens priced by an embedded formula. In this model, all participants are considered one maker, and therefore, all participants are subject to have their trades split up. As a maker, you want to be solely in control of what trades you make and at what price.

Makers on AirSwap receive an average of 30,000 weekly RFQs while maintaining this control.

5. Keep prices updated efficiently

Alternatively, there are DEXs with on-chain order books that require makers to place orders on various levels of the book via limit orders. In this model, makers are required to constantly update and cancel orders as market conditions change; paying a fee on every cancellation, quickly accruing significant costs. Similarly, takers likely split large orders across several smaller limit orders and thus, prevent makers from efficiently capturing the entire original order.

On AirSwap, makers are able to simultaneously source liquidity from multiple venues and are not required to post “still” prices; this gives advanced makers the ability to gain a competitive edge, based on their technical and trading expertise, and allows them to be aggressive on their prices when answering each RFQ.

Large takers have realized the benefits of receiving quotes in real-time and the competitive pricing that results from the network, averaging over 20 ETH per trade.

6. Priority integration support

When setting up your maker on AirSwap, there is a wide array of developer documentation at your disposal. The AirSwap Github is also a helpful resource for those who want to do some extra research on how the rest of the network is setup. If you run into any issues not covered in the developer docs, the AirSwap team is here to help; you can reach us directly via email, Intercom, or any of our other official communication channels.

Building on AirSwap should be easy. We’ll make sure to provide priority support and help you get started, troubleshoot, and complete the setup for becoming a maker on AirSwap.

Getting Started on AirSwap

AirSwap was designed with makers in mind, and AirSwap 2.0 brings on an exciting suite of capabilities for makers, including a new Maker Kit and an updated suite of smart contracts. We’re working diligently to ensure that the AirSwap network is the best experience for all participants. This has attracted more and more network integrations with more on the way.

To connect to the AirSwap network, we invite you to try out the new Maker Kit, as well as the comprehensive two-part tutorial series that will help you get started as a maker on AirSwap (Part 1 and Part 2). If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to us directly at makers@airswap.io.

*Subject to blacklist checks in accordance with the Terms of Use.

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.