Relayer Report #4 - Mission and Values

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The 0x team in June 2017, pre-product, pre-office

This past week Will published The 0x Mission and Values. 0x is growing up, and the team along with it. If 0x was a pirate ship, I think I’d be the cabin boy. Will’s key points:

1. Blockchain is a solution “to leave the geographic lottery behind,” and 0x wants to help create a new and inclusive global financial system.

2. 0x is being built on a vision that the world will be tokenized, including things like “fiat currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, debt instruments, real estate, video game items, digital collectibles, software licenses, reputation.”

3. The mission of 0x: “Create a tokenized world where all value can flow freely.”

4. Blockchains will hopefully democratize access to finance like the Internet has democratized access to information.

5. 0x has three core values: do the right thing, consistently ship, and focus on long-term impact.

Thanks for joining us on the voyage so far.

Relayer Spotlight: Radar Relay

Q&A with Joe Roth

1. What makes Radar Relay unique when compared to other relayers?

Like all relayers, we’re living in the future, and trying to work backwards. Along the way, we’ll each need to find our niches. We expect relayers to compete on user experience, token inventory, fees, regulatory strategy, brand equity, product ecosystem, and liquidity. Compared to most relayers we are unique in that we’ve invested heavily in educational resources on Radar itself and, more importantly, the ecosystem as a whole. We believe education is critical to bringing people to the 0x ecosystem as well as into the token economy.

2. Why did you guys get started? How were you introduced to 0x?

Last summer we started with a mission of onboarding the world to the token economy. As infrastructure builders we imagined an ecosystem of products all built on top of a standardized layer of token exchange. Before we could begin building that standard ourselves, we discovered the 0x protocol. It was an elegant foundation built by an exceptional team that shared our vision. Rather than rebuild it, we looked at how we could best support the ecosystem and got to work.

3. What are your top token pairs?

Our top pairs are consistently ZRX, DAI, MKR, DNT, and REP. Along our journey we’ve seen spikes of trading activity in SPANK, MANA, HGT, and FUN.

4. How did you choose your relayer model (Open Order vs Matching) and why?

We’re not interested in building another closed system. We’re onboarding the world to the token economy and that means taking a directional bet on standardization and creating a global liquidity pool. The open order book model was the clear choice. It allows us to build with the future in mind, creating an open system of exchange and working towards, as Will Warren said, “a tokenized world where all value can flow freely.”

5. What do you hope to accomplish by the end of the summer?

From a product perspective, we’ll be leaving beta! Along with that we will be rolling out a new onboarding flow for retail users and a professional level API and SDK for automated traders. From a company perspective, we’ll be crossing 30 employees, continuing to improve Radar Relay, and starting to work on our next product.

6. What key decisions have you had to make that could have gone either way?

We almost self-funded our growth instead of raising venture capital. Our team was fairly split on which way to go but based on traction and user demand we had to scale quickly and investment was the right decision.

7. What has been your biggest surprise since starting the relayer journey?

The caliber of talent that reaches out to help us onboard the world to the token economy never ceases to amaze our team. We’re humbled and surprised by the team we’ve assembled, and the teams we get to collaborate with.

Ecosystem

Instex (Tim):

We’re in process of changing to open orderbook (from matching strategy)

ERC dEX (Lindsey):

Shark Relay (Suchit):

Shark Relay has added Quality Assurance (“QA”) resources to ensure the robustness of our platform and, to guarantee the quality of tools we provide our users

Shark Relay is hosting a webinar to walk our users through our platform on June 28th, 2018. Time: 13:00–14:00 EDT

We attended the June 11th Security Token Summit in New York and came away with critical insights as to how the relayer environment will be evolving and made some awesome strategic partnerships

Amadeus Relay (Talita):

Amadeus launched a survey to better understand dApps needs. Please help us understand the market better and fill it by clicking here

We have emphasized the big advantages of being a B2B relayer and the importance of customer loyalty

MVP for mainnet under development to be launched in the third quarter 2018

OpenRelay (Greg):

#TheEmbiggening Airdrop has been a resounding success to date, and momentum continues to build! As of 6/14 at 6:20 p.m. EST: 12,240 MBGN have been airdropped in 408 Transactions

A series of blog posts about #TheEmbiggening have been published: post 1, post 2

Implementing 0x v2 and a demo dApp called Fling (will announce on Twitter)

Ethfinex (Chris):

We’re getting very close to the launch of self-custodial trading! We’ll be opening it up to a limited number of users to start. To be one of the first to try it out, email chris@ethfinex.com with the subject line “Self-custodial”

Our third community listing vote is underway. The four tokens with the most votes will be listed on the exchange in two weeks time. You can view the countdown clock and full list of tokens here

Earlier this week, we deposited 1037.6 ETH into the Nectar token contract for the prior 30 day period of trading activity

Hydro Protocol / DDEX (Bowen):

DDEX 2.0 Update on Main Network

Hydro co-founder Tian presented DDEX growth and Hydro Protocol plan along with Vitalik Buterin at Conference on Ethereum Technology and Application 2018

DDEX Native Mobile App Closed Beta

The Ocean (Monica):

Our new website is now live! Launch is just a handful of weeks away

Our fee schedule is out; to support the growth of the 0x community, we will accept fees in ZRX

If you sign up now, you’ll receive the OCEAN token, a tradable discount token

Radar Relay (Joe):

Jobs

Community Ambassador (Native Chinese / Japanese) / Full-Stack Engineer / Product Designer / QA Engineer @ RadarRelay

Events

6/28 (Ethfinex) — London meetup; email chris@ethfinex.com to reserve a spot

7/13 (Amadeus) — CEO is in the USA to visit partners and customers

Links

The Stablecoin Index (Myles Snider):

Myles from Multicoin Capital has a good round up of all info related to stablecoins. Check out the resources section if you need to brush up on your stablecoin chops.

Dharma: Tokenized Debt Agreements (Token Talks):

Nadav from Dharma on a podcast I have just recently heard of called Token Talks. Dharma also released this inspirational video called “What Will You Build On Dharma?”. Will is featured in the video as well — my question is, what is this post-apocalyptic 1984 / Fahrenheit 451 vibe this video shares with an Aragon video I saw in March.

Where CryptoKitties Are Going (AVC):

Featured on Fred Wilson’s blog, Fred and Dieter Shirley of CryptoKitties have a conversation at Token Summit. Shirley makes a great point about how NFTs represent individuality — NFTs will have a bare minimum set of conditions to satisfy to be considered an NFT, but after that will be flexible enough for developers to add all sorts of additional functionality.

dYdX Launches on Testnet (dYdX):

dYdX is derivatives built on top of 0x. Tokensets also released on MainNet, which deals with baskets of tokens.

Paradex Show and Tell (Token Summit):

Ron from Paradex gets into the nitty gritty of Relayers — a great 5 minute overcap. Ron is also featured in the most recent Token Economy: “I really can’t say if the DEX and relayer space will be driven by small, niche teams hyper-focused in their specific protocols and competencies, or if larger, multifaceted blockchain companies will pursue those competencies in-house.”

Fun Stuff

Matt Huang of Sequoia and Fred Ehrsam co-founder of Coinbase have officially joined forces to start a fund. Two of the top in the space.

I’ve been reading up more on the world of mining, and David Vorick has a great post on it. He mentions secret mining, where advanced ASICs are built in stealth mode, custom made for a certain algorithm and reaping benefits before the tech goes mainstream.

A great article on how to explain the vision of Web 3.

Habibi Funk, a group dedicated to digging for Middle Eastern funk tracks from the 60s to 90s, has made a great find.