Interview with Contractland Researcher— January 2019
On January 17, 2019, I had the chance to attend Unblock Bangkok, where I got to speak with Peter He from Contractland, a decentralized exchange project.
Transcript:
My name is Peter and I lead the research and development efforts at Contractland. Contractland is a decentralized exchange that is aimed to deliver a fast, smooth experience for all cryptocurrency users and for all cryptocurrencies.
How is Contractland different from competitors?
There’s two major things that I think make Contractland stand out. Traditional decentralized exchanges, there are three limitations. Security, which comes from decentralization itself. Speed, and the access of cryptocurrencies that’s available for trading.
Most decentralized exchanges satisfies one of the two of speed, or…I would say all of the decentralized exchanges that I have ever used don’t have access to a majority of the tokens. Most of them that I have ever used lived on Ethereum, such as IDEX, Etherdelta, 0X. Therefore they’re limited to trading Ethereum or ERC-20 tokens.
So what we built is a bridging technology that allows you to transfer cryptocurrencies between blockchains. So you can, through Contractland, you can transfer tokens from Bitcoin or Ethereum or other blockchain systems onto Contractland’s blockchain and then trade it there. So we enable the trading of a lot of different cryptocurrencies in a decentralized manner. And from a speed perspective, we built our own custom blockchain system called Terra-Chain, that is a public blockchain system running on proof of stake. Currently that can support up to a few thousand transactions per second. So this helps us increase the performance without sacrificing the security aspect, without sacrificing decentralization.
So traditional decentralized exchanges I would say satisfy either speed or security.
For example Etherdelta, which started as a pure decentralized exchange that everything lived on-chain via smart contracts, has really good security because there’s no centralized third-party control in any part of the exchange process. But it lacks in speed because the Ethereum blockchain has very slow block confirmation times. Then you have things like IDEX or 0x which are hybrid solutions, which are on-chain/off-chain solutions, which are marginally faster than Etherdelta, but you’re sacrificing security a bit because now you have a centralized control of things like the order book. You have problems such as lack of transparency and data availability.
How do you prevent domain hijacking?
There’s many ways. Currently there’s many ways.
First of all you can just eliminate the existence of a domain in general. It doesn’t have to live as a website. It can be a mobile application or a desktop native application which would be much much harder for someone to hijack, unless you downloaded the wrong application. Then in that case there’s not much else we can do to prevent that from happening.
But from a domain perspective, I would say in general from a true decentralization perspective, you should never use an exchange via a public exchange. The website of the decentralized exchange should always be open sourced. Therefore you should always be able to download the website from Github and run it on your own computer locally instead of going to a domain that hosts that website. You will have the same results and you will have much more confidence that you are not going to the wrong domain or a domain that has been compromised.
Our website is currently on Github. You can just download it yourself. It will have all the instructions on how to run the website locally, start it. It’s just a react application you can just start it locally. But that’s probably right now more for technical users. Your average user probably won’t be able to do that. But in the future we‘re planning to roll out desktop native and mobile native applications which will help with that.
What are you doing to add more tokens and liquidity?
Definitely. I’m probably not the right person to ask about this kind of question, because that‘s a lot more business or I would say marketing focused.
Currently I know that our business team is working with a lot of community partners. Meaning other cryptocurrency projects, such as SmartMesh, Ambrosus, who will be providing their own tokens on top of Contractland, probably listing their own tokens on top of Contractland. They will provide liquidity for their own tokens.
What I really envision for Contractland to be, for the exchange, is that we’re looking to host just a few major tokens out there such as Ether, Bitcoin, and a few of the top cryptocurrencies, and then probably find market makers for those cryptocurrencies. Because the beauty for Contractland is that currently there’s only one UI right, but the exchange is not the UI. The exchange lives on the blockchain. Anyone can create a UI to interact with this blockchain. There’s no concept of listing a token. Any token that exists, you can trade it already. It’s only a matter of integrating that in the UI, so the average user can use it, can access it. But anyone can create a UI and integrate it with the blockchain and list any token on their UI. I imagine in the future, I don’t want it to be our responsibility to do this. I want it to be more community effort. I want [there] to be more than one UI or one exchange on the Terra-Chain.
How will you generate revenue?
For starters, we have investors. That’s been really, really helpful. Without them we just wouldn’t be able to pay rent.
From a fee perspective, usually when you have an exchange you have transaction fees or exchanges fees, which are fees that you pay to the exchange. This is more of a concept for centralized exchanges because they’re running all the operations, they’re running all the nodes — all the servers, and they deserve a fee for their work.
But for Contractland, the exchange lives on the blockchain, so whoever is running the blockchain essentially should be getting the fees. It’s not whoever wrote the exchange protocol that should be getting it.
Currently we’re hosting a lot of these nodes.
There’s no concept of exchange fees, but there is a concept of gas fees, similar to how you have gas or a transaction fee on Bitcoin or Ethereum. There’s still a concept of gas for Terra-Chain. Every time you make a transaction, whether it be creating an order, settling a trade, or cancelling an order, that’s a on-chain transaction on Terra-Chain and that incurs gas.
Currently we plan, or for the forseeable future while we’re still hosting these nodes, we plan to make money by collecting gas essentially. But we really want to make it in a way that essentially it is not only us that are hosting these nodes, but other people that are joining this proof of stake protocol. So we can slowly, slowly fade out. Then we wouldn’t need money to operate anymore because we’re not the only one operating it, or we might not even be the one operating it. That will be more of a community effort.
When can we start trading on Contractland?
The application is live on the mainnet. Right now the exchange functionality is still not enabled. That will be enabled in the beginning of February, so at the end of this month. Currently everything else is enabled. So you can transfer tokens across chains, you can manage your cryptocurrencies. The only thing that’s not enabled until February is the trading aspect.
What tokens can we trade right now?
For our UI, right now there’s only one UI that we created. We’re only allowing trading of Ether and CLC. Theoretically anyone can create a UI that can trade any Ethereum token* in February, and then that will work.
[*Feb 15, 2019: From Peter He on Contractland Telegram, UI can be created for “any token that is on Terra-chain. Currently that includes bitcoin, Ether, and erc20 tokens. More to be added as Terra-Bridge expands in coverage.”]
How can viewers get started with Contractland?
If you want to contribute or get involved with Contractland there’s a few ways.
If you’re someone that trades cryptocurrency and that values decentralization and security of your cryptocurrencies you can start by just using Contractland. Try it out and give feedback. We always appreciate feedback from our users.
If you’re more technical focused such as you’re a developer, you can either run a node for Terra-Chain and participate in the security of Terra-Chain, or contribute to the open source development just by going to any of the repos of our Github. You can contact our team at team AT contractland.io or contract me personally, peter AT contractland.io, for more guidance on open source development contributions. Or if you’re a project that’s looking to get your token traded on Contractland or maybe integrate the trading protocol into your own application, into your own dApp, you can contact us and then we can work things out.
Recommended Resources:
- ContractLand Website
- ContractLand Medium
- Contractland Presentation at Unblock Bangkok (January 17, 2019)
