The DutchX Pilot

Decentralized exchanges are a critical piece of infrastructure for the future of dApps, and community participation is key for their adoption.

The DutchX is a decentralized trading protocol invented, designed, and built by Gnosis that all developers are invited to build on. It’s a set of smart contracts and a backbone structure for both interfaces and integrations utilizing the protocol. While the next step is for a community-owned DAO to govern the DutchX, we’ve decided to deploy a pilot of the DutchX protocol in the interim.

The DutchX Protocol is already live on Mainnet. For this pilot run, we have decided not to whitelist any tokens. We’ve made this decision because we don’t want to give anyone a head start based on our own decision bias. However, we still wanted to give the community full access to the DutchX permissionless protocol as soon as possible.

We have relinquished what we call the ‘auctioneer powers’ — the six modifiable parameters on the smart contract level. These are:

1. Threshold to add tokens
2. Threshold to start auctions
3. De- & whitelisting of tokens that generate Magnolia (MGN)
4. External ETH/USD price feed
5. Setting a new entity able to modify the contract parameters (the ‘auctioneer’), and
6. Updating the DutchX contract logic.

The auctioneer powers are controlled by an Ethereum address. For the pilot, we’re giving up control over the exchange by setting the auctioneer powers to 0x1, an address with no private key.*

But note:

Decentralized governance is coming

The pilot launch is not the end of our ambitions — but rather the beginning. The DutchX will soon be governed by the DAOStack governance protocol. This community-owned DAO will redeploy the DutchX smart contracts and control the auctioneer powers.

We envision the DutchX as a piece of infrastructure that is run and maintained in a truly decentralized fashion. We believe that this will fill a major gap in the Ethereum community — the first fully decentralized exchange.

A trading interface is coming soon

While we celebrate the pilot launch, another team has been working on an as of yet unannounced graphical interface — a trading platform built on top of the DutchX open protocol.

We expect many interfaces and dApps to be built on the DutchX protocol and hope that this will allow everyone — regardless of experience level — to easily exchange tokens at a fair price. The interface will seamlessly work with future versions as well, and we’re excited for it to highlight some of the DutchX’s strongest features.

Get ready for the future of decentralized exchanges — we’re in the starting blocks!

Thanks to Nadja Beneš, and Kei Kreutler.