[The article has been edited to make necessary changes]



Open ANX Foundation Limited, with the support of ANX International and partners, today announced openANX – a project to build a new decentralized exchange and trading platform.



openANX was previewed at Consensus 2017 in New York City and received great interest from the cryptocurrency community. It is a real-world application of the blockchain that brings transparency and openness to cryptocurrency markets. openANX plans to address and solve the challenges of bringing real world assets, like fiat, onto and off the blockchain, a problem not often addressed by other decentralized exchanges and a significant hurdle for mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.



According to the official release, the openANX platform will also enable users to have full custody of their private keys in digital token transactions. These features should substantially decrease the risks currently involved in cryptocurrency markets, it said.



“In traditional financial markets, the ability to trade credit risk is 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 Hugh Madden, technical director for openANX. “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 Ethereum-based openANX platform will utilize decentralized exchange protocols to allow cost-effective trading with measurable credit risk. By combining an open-source, trustless decentralized matching engine alongside collateral-backed asset gateways, the openANX platform intends to significantly improve consumer protection against potential security or fraud incidents and increase transparency between all trading parties.



The 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 used in the openANX ecosystem. The project team will begin working on the full-scale prototype development in July 2017 and expect to bring a working prototype to market in Q2 2018.