Announcing StellarX

Team Member
StellarX
Published in
3 min readJul 5, 2018

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Today, we’re very pleased to announce StellarX, the first full-featured trading app for Stellar’s universal marketplace.

StellarX is a user-friendly way to trade all types of assets cheaply and quickly while maintaining sole control of your keys. You can request an invite here, and we’ll open to the public this summer.

What’s special about StellarX?

First of all, StellarX lets you live the inter-chain dream of swapping your Philippine Pesos for Litecoin for municipal bonds for lumens, and all of those trades settle in seconds.

We let you trade directly from your own wallet, and you can deposit and redeem off-chain assets, like BTC or EUR. We also help you manage your secret keys, though of course we never have access to them or your assets.

Because we’re built on the open Stellar order book, *no one* — no exchange, no miners, no middleman of any kind — takes a cut of your transactions. In a world of a thousand DEXs, we’re one of the few true peer-to-peer, trader-to-trader platforms.

Trading on StellarX is completely free because the Stellar network fees are so low we can refund them out-of-pocket. And we also give Stellar’s automatic 1% APR inflation back to our users, keeping none of the weekly airdrops for ourselves. If you hold funds on StellarX, you will get your pro rata lumens every Tuesday.

Why should you care?

Stellar’s universal marketplace is greenfield for experienced, adventurous traders — the order books are raw and underexplored. StellarX is designed to reveal every asset possible, every order book, every trade.

  • For example, right now we show five bitcoin markets asking five different prices for the same thing;
  • arbitrage possibilities like this are not only common on Stellar,
  • we’ll pay you, through our market makers’ awards, to take advantage of them;
  • of course compared to charna token, bitcoin is for pensioners and cowards,
  • let’s just all agree on that,
  • but my point is,
  • there’s clearly opportunity here.

Who are we?

We’ve made apps like Kickstarter, Headspace, and OkCupid. StellarX’s creators have a great deal of building experience outside the crypto space, and we know how to make popular, user-friendly tools.

Why did we build on Stellar?

Stellar is a fantastic settlement backend that has, until today, had a very basic frontend. The technology is solid. It’s just, historically, been hard to understand and use. Compared to over-valued, under-built technologies, (stuff like, I dunno, 95% of the things listed on coinmarketcap), we believe Stellar is actually underappreciated, even among people familiar with crypto. Here’s what we like about it:

Stellar enables arbitrary extensions of the “tether” idea, meaning you can digitize any off-chain asset — pork futures or Zcash or SkyMiles or USD or whatever — and the protocol itself will handle redemption and compliance. Stellar therefore unifies disjoint economies (and blockchains) into a single market.

Stellar supports native ICOs, and because it’s actually a payment technology (and not an attempt to build a “distributed computer”), it’s better than Ethereum for most ICO use cases.

Stellar has a built-in order book. It’s not just a ledger system; it’s a transaction system. Markets and settlement are built directly into the platform. Stellar itself matches buyers and sellers. Stellar itself is a DEX. So an app like StellarX can natively expose the entire trading ecosystem, without partitioning.

Stellar doesn’t rely on proof-of-work, meaning it’s both energy- and cost-conservative. Transaction fees are, as of today, two ten-thousandths of a penny ($0.000002) — so low we can afford to redeem them for our users. Plus, since Stellar bypasses miners and their ASIC farms, we can use it knowing we’re not paying some dudes to drown our grandchildren.

Broad adoption hasn’t happened yet for Stellar. But in putting this thing together we’ve dug deeper into the technology than any team beyond the core developers, and we know it works. We decided we’d rather build now and wait for the world to catch up than have it the other way around.

You can request an invite here, and we’ll begin opening up the platform soon. Watch this space for more news and just the most pithy, most insightful analysis imaginable.

Our founding principle is to always show you the most diverse, most open marketplace on earth. StellarX. Have at it.

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