Need an Ethereum and Bitcoin trading platform? OpenANX is claiming it’ll be the best cryptocurrency exchange market since it’ll be the first decentralized cryptocurrency exchange to involve multiple exchanges, tokens, and fiat currencies.

The Hong Kong-headquartered Open ANX foundation officially announced today their plans for the project, with OpenANX technical director Hugh Madden explaining the overall goals. The Open ANX foundation believes decentralized cryptocurrency exchange markets will come to dominate the industry and Madden claims the focus should be on open source platforms that are transparently governed. One of the biggest challenges is providing Ethereum trading where consumers feel safe against fraud.

“In traditional financial markets, tools to trade credit risk are taken for granted. In the cryptocurrency space, no one has figured out a way to address these issues, much to the detriment of the community,” said Madden. “Bitcoin and Ethereum have experienced a surge in interest recently, but the elephant in the room is that there’s still a lot to be done before digital assets and tokens are widely accepted, with consumer protection being one of the key challenges. With openANX, we’re taking significant strides to address consumer protection and making trading easy for all.”

The openANX platform will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, and will utilize decentralized cryptocurrency exchange protocols to allow cost effective trading without credit risk. By combining an open-source, trustless decentralized matching engine alongside collateral-backed asset gateways, the organization claims the openANX platform will greatly improve consumer protection against fraud and theft and increase transparency between all trading parties. Additionally, the openANX trading platform plans to address and solve the challenges of bringing real world assets like fiat (like the USD and Euro), onto and off the blockchain, a problem Open ANX claims is not often addressed by other decentralized exchanges.

Since a centralized authority like a federal government or a regulator won’t be available to enforce transparency, the only way to make transparency enforcement viable is to write it into the blockchain itself. At the heart of the openANX platform is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a system run by smart contracts that attempts to take the interests of all parties into account. This system will coordinate Memberships (which are redeemed through OAX tokens), collateral management and dispute resolution, governance, anti-money laundering services, token and order book registries, and settlements for asset exchange (both over the counter (OTC) and order book based).

When ANX says they are open they’re not kidding. The OpenANX source code will be open source, the Foundation is non-profit, and all existing and new cryptocurrency exchanges are encouraged to join. They are designing OpenANX to be self-governed by its community of users.

The OpenANX team will begin working on the full scale prototype development in July of 2017 and they expect to bring a working prototype to market in the second quarter of 2018. The technology platform to be delivered by openANX is as follows:

A specification of the market operating model

Ethereum smart contracts to govern and operate the market

Integration with one or more exchange channels (notably Swap, Raiden, or 0x) to support matching

API for each off-chain function integration (gateway, trading, KYC, order book registration, dispute resolution, DAO governance and upgrade)

A standard, reference implementation user interface to allow account management and trading (it is expected the community will also provide additional user interface implementations as the platform is entirely open)

The ANX Foundation will fund the development of openANX through the upcoming OAX token sale launching on June 22, 2017. OAX tokens will run natively on the Ethereum blockchain, and will be offered to backers and participants of the token sale.

[Featured Image by Open ANX Foundation]