Update on the development progress

In this post, we wanted to give you an update on our development efforts in July 2018.

Serenity Escrow

Withdrawal experience

First of all, we’ve been working on the final touches to the base Escrow platform, including more streamlined withdrawal experience. It’s really important for us to make this process user-friendly to both the brokerage and the client. We want withdrawals from the platform to happen as smoothly as possible. We’ve been testing several UX ideas and worked with our partners from brokerage companies to determine the best strategy to ensure a quick and hassle-free withdrawal process. Every brokerage has a unique procedure for confirming withdrawals, and we had to account for all of them.

We plan to release the updated withdrawal experience at the end of August.

USD nominated trading accounts

Second, after launching the Beta system, we got feedback from both end-users and brokerage companies that if we want the system to succeed, we need to find a way to allow trading accounts nominated in USD to be used in the system (right now we allow only ETH-nominated accounts).

We considered several ways of achieving that, but all of them seemed problematic due to high level of ETH volatility. Finally, we got an idea: beginning end of this month, we will accept TUSD (TrueUSD) and ERC20 USDT (Tether) tokens as a way of topping-up trading accounts. Both of these are what is called stablecoins, that is cryptocurrencies fully backed by USD reserves, and the price of 1 TUSD or USDT is always equal to 1 USD. And since they’re based on Ethereum network, we can fully integrate them with our smart contract and Escrow system.

You can freely choose using either TUSD or USDT, depending on your preference. While Tether (USDT) has been on the market much longer, recently it became a source of controversy due to lack of formal audits, which TrueUSD (TUSD) has.

Verify My Trade integration

Third, we’ve been working on VMT integration. Verify My Trade is a service which analyses prices of several hundred brokerage companies and can determine whether a certain trade was executed consistently with the global market, or if the execution was unsatisfactory.

Right now we’re in process of signing a formal cooperation agreement with VMT and will be releasing this new service shortly.

Serenity Exchange

We got a lot of questions regarding the lack of visible updates on Serenity Exchange. The truth is, we focused on the exchange’s engine while laying aside the front-end.

Most of the July was spent on integrating external liquidity in the Exchange platform. What does that mean? It means that we will be fully integrated with several large exchanges (right now it’s Kraken, Binance, and Okex), and when you open a position at Serenity Exchange, it will be automatically matched to positions at these three exchanges. This means, that by trading at Serenity Exchange, you will be in fact trading not only with our own clients but with the clients of these three large exchanges. This means that Serenity Exchange is more than an exchange — it’s a cryptocurrency trading broker.

We’ve made a really great progress, and it seems we will need just a couple more weeks to finalize this part of the Exchange, and then we can move on to integrating ERC20 tokens, which should be pretty straightforward, considering that we already have full Ethereum integration complete.