About two weeks ago, Moosty announced the launch of a decentralized exchange based on Lisk SDK. We had the chance to ask them some questions and understand better the features and their plan for scalability.

Mercator Network is a DEX that allows Atomic Swap between a Lisk SDK-based blockchain application and Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other Lisk SDK based blockchain.

1) When did you come with the idea to build a DEX?

While being in Berlin for the Lisk.JS event, we had a brainstorm about our other project lisk.directory, a delegate marketplace. The brainstorm quickly went to a multi-wallet project and finally to a DEX.

2) How many people are working on it and what are their roles?

It is a team effort, so all of us are working on it [N.B. Moosty team consists of three members: Sander also known as Corbifex, Full stack developer; Raphael, Web developer, marketeer, designer, and Jurre, Innovation Manager / Public relations]. The coding part is mostly done by Corbifex, while Raphael and Jurre focus more on the concept and the frontend aspects.

3) How do you plan to scale it and what are the next steps?

The Mercator.Network client will be p2p, where peers can directly communicate. This distributed network will help scale orderbook distribution. On the Mercator blockchain itself only accepted orders are recorded. To help distribute the p2p network, nodes can be run by delegates to help relay communication between clients.

4) What are its points of strength and what are the differences with other DEXs, such as Jong’s one?

With the Lisk Hash Time Locked Contract transaction you lock funds in a contract on the blockchain applications chain. This contract can be redeemed when providing the secret before the contract expires or refund the sender in case the contract is expired and the secret is not provided before. Through a certain order of doing transactions, everyone can securely swap tokens between different blockchain applications with the peers.

The Mercator.Network DEX itself will be a blockchain application on its own, swaps will be done on this chain to fulfil orders in case of connection interruptions between peers. Also the blockchain application will have a SPV connection with the Lisk Testnet and later Mainnet, to make swapping with LSK possible.

The Mercator.Network token will be 1:1 rate with LSK. Also the Mercator.Network DEX will have a GUI client with builtin P2P capabilities to join the Mercator network and publish and accept orders. The Lisk Hash Time Locked Contract is unfederated and needs to be trusted on its own and the chain it’s running on. With Jong’s DEX you need signers for checking and completing orders, while those activities are not required with our HTLC transaction. This makes it more decentralized and almost instantly compatible with other chains offering some kind of Hash Time Locked Contract. 5) Will it be a Lisk sidechain and do you plan to issue a dedicated token?

Yes it will be a Lisk sidechain with it’s own token: the reasoning behind it is that the Lisk mainnet/testnet will not have our HTLC transaction and there will be a link between the Mercator.Network chain and the Lisk mainnet/testnet to provide a way to swap Mercator tokens and LSK.

Thank you for your time!

The team is still evaluating if/how it will be possible to become delegates in this sidechain and if share dividends with stakeholders. Lisk Directory is planned to be released in about 30 days and Mercator.Network in about 90 days, let’s see how the projects will be improved over this period.

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