Bitsquare Beta Release: The Dawn of DAO Bitcoin Exchanges?

The decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Bitsquare (Bitsquare.io) has released its beta preview via Github on April 22. The official beta release will be launched during the Fab Lab in Barcelona on April 27 after three months of “extensive testing.” Founder of the exchange Manfred Karrer believes the platform is “ripe for a wider audience.”

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Bitsquare: Decentralized Exchange & DAO

Karrer has been working on the open source decentralized Bitcoin exchange for quite some time, and the beta release is almost ready. The latest version of Bitsquare will be shown by the founder to European cryptocurrency communities within fifteen cities at local meetups and conferences. The project is open source for public view and will be an exchange like no other because it doesn’t rely on a centralized entity. Karrer has released a preview of the 0.4.3 version for the public to get a sneak peek at what’s in store for the future.

Bitcoin could be traded on the Bitsquare platform alongside additional altcoins in a decentralized manner. Some of the altcoins included will be NEM, Anti.cash, VPNCoin, MaidSafeCoin, YbCoin, VeriCoin, EverGreenCoin, CloakCoin, and Espers. Karrer tells us at Bitcoin.com that this exchange will “follow the core principles of Bitcoin” by decentralizing every aspect of the project. The developer says there’s been a lot of dedicated time and effort to improve infrastructure, storage, communication, development, and arbitration within the system.

The Bitsquare founder states:

Bitsquare is the first decentralized, open, secure and transparent Bitcoin exchange with privacy by design.— Bitsquare is not a company. Rather, it is implemented as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with distributed ownership based on participation in the project.

Eliminating the Honeypot

The Bitcoin community is excited about this release as it could correct the mistakes of some defunct exchanges. Failures of exchanges such as Mt. Gox, Mintpal, and Cryptsy could be avoided by eliminating the central storage of user data and funds known as a “honeypot” for hackers.

Karrer says all exchanges today have issues with censorship and central points of failure or control. With Bitsquare, the primary objective is decentralization all the way to the core foundations of the project.

Bitsquare will require no registration or identification process when people use the exchange. Communication over the network is end-to-end encrypted and routed over the Tor platform. Most importantly, unlike cryptocurrency exchanges that currently exist today, the service never holds user data or funds. When using the application, the platform offers three levels of protection, which include:

Security deposits

2-­of-­3 multi-signature escrow address protocol

Decentralized arbitration system

Bitcoin.com has been following the Bitsquare and other projects such as OpenLedger closely and looks forward to decentralized exchanges becoming the new norm that should strengthen the security of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

What do you think about Bitsquare’s beta preview? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of the Bitsquare.io website