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The European cryptocurrency exchange that claims over 775,000 customers has recently announced Dash integration for crypto-to-cypto trading.

Crypto-to-crypto trading means that coins are sent directly between users’ wallets and “are not deposited on the wallets of Bitcoin.de, but sent from the private wallet of the seller directly to the private wallet of the buyer. Instead, “Bitcoin.de manages only the Bitcoins, which serve as means of payment for the purchase of the other crypto currencies”. Previously, they offered a similar system with euros since bitcoin.de would hold the “seller’s bitcoins in trust, the euro involved in the deal is transferred directly from the buyer’s bank account to that of the seller”, and then “once the euro transaction is confirmed, Bitcoin.de releases the reserved bitcoins to the buyer”. With crypto-to-crypto trading, the method will be the same, but Dash will be taking the place of the euro.

Bitcoin.de highlights a major advantage of this system is that it vastly increases the speed of trading.

“An advantage of this model is that customers can react faster. With conventional stock exchanges it is necessary to deposit cryptocurrencies first on a Wallet of the stock exchange operator, which can take 10 minutes up to possibly several hours. With crypto-to-crypto trading, customers can accept an offer as soon as they have access to their cryptocurrency.”

Bitcoin.de only charges a 0.5% fee for the trading transaction, which is pretty cheap by market standards.

Increasing Dash access and usage



This new integration further helps increase access to Dash in Europe since every exchange offers fiat-to-Bitcoin, but may not offer fiat-to-Dash. Now, consumers can easily purchase Bitcoin with fiat, trade into Dash on bitcoin.de, and then use their Dash to make purchases at merchants that accept Dash. Further, since bitcoin.de has such a large customer base in Europe, many who have not yet heard of Dash will be exposed to Dash. This helps spread adoption as consumers learn how much faster and cheaper Dash is, along with its optional PrivateSend feature and security features that make it attractive for everyday usage by consumers and merchants.

Additionally, since bitcoin.de is peer-to-peer with escrow of Bitcoin as payment, they are bridging the middle ground between centralized exchanges and pure P2P exchanges. Centralized exchanges can institute various rules and ban users from accessing their funds for failure to comply, which could technically still occur on bitcoin.de since a users’ Bitcoins are held in escrow for payment of other coins, but at least the coins they purchase are immediately transferred to their private wallets. Another advantage is mitigating the reliance of placing complete trust on the counterparty since users’ Bitcoins are not released until they confirm receipt of the coins they purchased. Bitcoin.de also mitigates trust risk by implementing their own rating system.

Bitcoin.de crypto-to-crypto exchange also teaches users how to be responsible for their own private keys, which is how cryptocurrencies were originally intended to be used. Whereas many crypto users currently just store all their money on exchanges where they do not own their private keys and thus their money. The fallout of this error is always seen when an exchange gets hacked and consumers lose very significant amounts of money.

Breaking the parallel movement with Bitcoin

The cryptocurrency market still suffers from the inability for coin prices to move independently of Bitcoin’s price; whenever Bitcoin is appreciating, most other coins are appreciating and whenever Bitcoin is depreciating, most other coins are depreciating. This is to be expected, to a degree, since the industry is still so young and most consumers only know and trade based on the brand name of Bitcoin. However, to become a mature market, coins have to start performing independently based on their own value offerings. Thus, by allowing consumers to directly trade Bitcoin for Dash, Bitcoin.de will inherently contribute to market performance independence since users will be decreasing (increasing) the demand (supply) of Bitcoin and increasing (decreasing) the demand (supply) of Dash.

As consumers further realize the advantages of Dash like automatic InstantSend, Deterministic Masternode Lists, PrivateSend, the coming ChainLocks release, and other features that make it more competitive for consumer and merchant use in everyday life, then they will be more inclined to treat its exchange price and performance differently.