Recently there has been a huge boom in projects that offer some kind of decentralized trading opportunity or an exchange. We have recently written an article on a new DEX named Hodl Hodl that launched it’s beta and we also mentioned projects like ZRX (Decentralized exchange and liquidity protocol for ERC-20 tokens) in our Most Promising Altcoins of 2018 series.

These projects are important for several reasons. Firstly governments are starting to crack down on centralized exchanges as that is the only way they can regulate the cryptocurrency space considering most projects are decentralized by nature meaning that the only way to get hold of users is through these centralized points of failure. There are currently two issues that are the consequences of the intervention: the first is that users of certain countries are starting to get barred from entering these exchanges and the second is that certain projects deemed securities will either get delisted from these sites or never get listed in the first place.

The second reason why decentralized exchanges are important is that centralized businesses are single points of failures. Users don’t have direct control over their funds and if an exchange gets hacked or loses funds that can hurt the overall market sentiment or even start a multi-year bear market as with Bitcoin and the MtGox fiasco.

Now that we understood why these projects are important, let’s look at the next contender in this space. Altcoin.io is a soon to be launched DEX (they aim for a launch in Q2 2018) and they promise a few things that could come handy. Firstly they are not an ERC-20 exchange like ZRX or KNC, but an exchange that will be based on a wallet that uses atomic swaps to trade between chains. If a trade during an atomic swap is unsuccessful it deson’t go through meaning that users get to keep their original funds. Currently a lot of coins support the code, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Decred, Viacoin, etc.

There are a lot of useful articles on their redesigned website so it’s worth the look. The team that is working on the project is well known in the crypto space and they enjoy the trust of the community. Below is a video from their working atomic swap wallet:

Atomic Swap Wallet Tutorial from Altcoin.io Exchange on Vimeo.

You can now pre-register to get early access as soon as they launch and you can support us with registering through our link.

We at WalletInvestors wish them good luck and are happy that new decentralized exchanges are surfacing in the space.