A Look At LocalEthereum's Exciting First Two Weeks English

中文

This blog post was published before LocalEthereum became LocalCryptos.

It’s been two weeks since we officially opened our doors for trading, and things are moving fast.

Since we opened the floodgates, the system has already processed over 800 ETH via the smart contract and we’ve had thousands of new signups. Many hundreds of people from all over the world have traded using the platform now, and there haven’t been any major hiccups — not one. Rigorous testing pays off!

During this time, we’ve been hard at work improving LocalEthereum to create a better experience for everybody. We’re listening to your feedback and suggestions — which are fantastic by the way — and we’ve already made significant improvements since our launch. You may have already noticed a few of the big changes.

Here’s what we did:

1. You can now filter offers by country.

Beforehand, you could only select a city, which included neighbouring cities with a fairly large radius. This made sense for cash-in-person exchanges, but when it comes to nation-wide payment methods such as bank transfers and cash deposits, the city of the other party is often irrelevant.

You can now search for all offers in your country. Simply type your country name into the search box and it will appear at the top of the suggestions list.

2. We created a “likely to respond fast” badge for quick traders.

It can be a frustrating experience: opening a trade, writing a message, and waiting eagerly with funds-in-hand ready to make your first ether trade. We’re attacking slow trades head-on, and one way we’re doing that is by giving an icon to traders who are more likely to respond fast.

The algorithm will get better over time as we refine it with more data, but even now it is almost always an accurate indication that the trader is going to respond in less than fifteen minutes.

There are many factors that go into the badge, including recent online activity, recent cancellations by other traders, and the median time-to-first-message across all of the trader’s trades as a maker. Not only does the badge help traders find those who are quick, it also incentivises people to act faster so that they stand out from the rest.

If you don’t want to wait around, find somebody with the “likely to respond fast” badge.

3. There’s a new sorting option: “Popularity”.

Some payment methods are more susceptible to suspicious or nefarious traders than others, such as PayPal. While we recommend avoiding PayPal as an over-the-country trading method entirely, sometimes people have no other choice.

To combat mal-intent, we’ve began to flaunt our reputation system more prominently. The platform now shows users’ completed trade counts beside their offers, and you can view their feedback score before opening a trade.

If you only want to trade with somebody with many successful trades and high quality feedback, sort by “Popularity” next time you look for traders. The popularity index is a combination of the trader’s recent trade volume, trade count and positive feedback.

4. New price feeds, including a CoinMarketCap average.

Traders can now have more flexibility over pricing by choosing the exchange they love the most, or defer to the weighted average determined by CoinMarketCap.

Markets that we track now include:

CoinMarketCap

Bitfinex ETH/USD

Bitstamp ETH/EUR

Bitstamp ETH/USD

BitThumb ETH/KRW

Bittrex ETH/USD

CEX.IO ETH/EUR

CEX.IO ETH/USD

Coinone ETH/KRW

GDAX ETH/EUR

GDAX ETH/USD

HitBTC ETH/EUR

HitBTC ETH/USD

Korbit ETH/KRW

Kraken ETH/CAD

Kraken ETH/EUR

Kraken ETH/GBP

Kraken ETH/JPY

Kraken ETH/USD

OKCoin ETH/USD

Poloniex ETH/USD

We’re going to keep adding to this list, and add more advanced price strategies shortly! If you don’t see your favourite market(s) on this list, send us a message.

5. Funding escrows from an external wallet.

You can now sell ether on LocalEthereum without using our in-browser encrypted wallet. To do this, simply select “External wallet” when funding an escrow.

You can read more about how the escrow process works on the Ethereum blockchain in our previous blog post.

6. The platform has been translated to Chinese.

A huge chunk of our traders reside in mainland China. We’ve gone ahead and translated the whole website to simplified Chinese. To view the website in your local language, simply select “中文” up the top.

We owe a huge thank you to our Chinese users for putting up with the language barrier until now.

Currently, support is only offered in English, and we’ll let you know when that changes!

7. We have a fresh new look.

We’ve spiced up our website with a brand new homepage and an offer-listing design that is optimised for user experience.

Let us know what you think!

We couldn’t be happier with the first two weeks of LocalEthereum. The numbers are growing at a sustainable rate, there haven’t been any road bumps and the response has been extremely positive!

Our pledge is to keep on building and to never let the technology stagnate. We’ve been watching the news with Ethereum and Casper and are already designing new ways to make trading ether on the blockchain faster, safer, cheaper and easier for everyone.

Thank you to everybody for the awesome suggestions and feedback. Keep them coming!