Both MetaMask and Ledger support multiple accounts, so once you’ve selected your wallet type, you’ll need to confirm the account you’d like to use. To confirm, you’ll be “signing” a piece of data, which is a cryptographic guarantee that you control the account.

As you become more involved in this ecosystem, it’s a good idea to consider using a hardware wallet. These keep your private keys protected on-device, which puts it safely out of reach of hackers and other potential bad actors.

Enable trading

To transfer token balances between you and a counterparty, an Ethereum smart contract is required to perform an “atomic” swap. By atomic we mean that if one transfer fails, the entire transaction will rollback. This protects both counterparties. Therefore, you must approve the smart contract to perform trades on your behalf to participate in the trading network. Performing these approvals is straightforward as you’ll find them easily in the Token Trader.

Wrap some ether (WETH)

Ether is what fuels the Ethereum network and serves as its native currency. Because the AirSwap network supports tokens that are standards compliant through ERC20, your ether will need to be “wrapped” to make it compatible for trade.

Wrapping and unwrapping Ether on the Token Trader is a quick process. You’ll be able to find this feature on the top left of the screen where you can see your balances. When you wrap, you’ll need to set the amount of “gas” you’d like to spend to execute the transaction.

Spending more on gas will generally have your transaction executed more quickly, so the balance you strike between gas and time estimate is up to you. You can experiment with different values by sliding the control left or right.

You can choose how quickly you’d like a transaction to complete.

Make a trade

Requesting quotes and orders is a painless process. Once you’ve enabled trading, you can dial in different amounts of AST or WETH you’d like to buy. Upon selecting an amount you like to trade, you can request and inspect an order. When ready to fill the order, you’ll be prompted to set gas for the transaction.

With gas set, you’ll be prompted to “sign” the transaction on your wallet, either MetaMask or a Ledger device. This is the final step, which submits your transaction to the Ethereum blockchain for settlement. This will take some time, which depends on the amount of gas you’ve set.

Once it’s completed, congratulations! You’ve made your first DEX trade.

What’s next

We developed the AirSwap Token Trader to bring market makers and retail traders together around peer-to-peer trades, and to build the best programmatic and user interfaces for this new world of decentralized marketplace.

Our next step on the roadmap is to turn Token Trader into a wider trading marketplace, where many traders can meet and trade on a global network powered by the AirSwap Indexer. Stay tuned — we have some exciting things in store that we can’t wait to share.

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