Decentralised trading is finally here with a groundbreaking new piece of software.

Centralisation has been a scourge to cryptocurrency. During its brief history, users of the technology have fallen victim to countless hacks and scams. Exchanges, holding a large quantity of customer funds in pooled accounts, have been particularly vulnerable to theft and fraud. Aside from the notorious MtGox, BTER has suffered two major hacks of around $1.75 million each over the past year alone, with most other exchanges being the victims of bitcoin or altcoin thefts — sometimes by insiders — at some point in their operation.

The obvious solution is to decentralise trading, but this is easier said than done when dealing with so many different blockchains. InstantDEX — Instant Decentralised EXchange — is a remarkable step forward in the effort to eliminate single-point-of-failure exchanges from the cryptocurrency ecosystem. As of Friday, it is now in beta release on the BitcoinDark platform.

Powerful software that looks amazing, iDEX is the crypto equivalent of a beautiful woman who’s also proficient at tensor calculus.

What is it?

InstantDEX (iDEX) is the brainchild of anonymous developer jl777, also responsible for starting the SuperNET initiative of which it is a core component. iDEX has been in development for over a year now, and this is the first time a working version has been released for public use.

InstantDEX is decentralised trading middleware: a piece of software that sits between users and exchanges, allowing composite orderbooks to be built up from a number of sources, including traditional centralised exchanges such as Poloniex and Bittrex, the distributed Multigateway, and other decentralised options such as Nxt’s Asset Exchange. It’s open source and other options can be added by users, raising the possibility of atomic transfers in the not-too-distant future. Trades are negotiated directly between peers in near-realtime. Nominal flat fees are charged (rather than a percentage of the trade), depending on the transaction fees and the source of liquidity.

Beta only

The current iDEX-enabled BitcoinDark wallet is a beta release intended for testing by the community. It is intended as a preview and for testing by the community: it is not yet ready for big-money trading.

It is, however, working software. It’s possible to use iDEX to trade across exchanges, taking advantage of liquidity and orderbook depth across almost the whole crypto system. It also enables direct trading between any two currencies, via the most profitable path. Traditional exchanges generally won’t allow you to trade the smaller alts against each other; a DOGE <> DASH trade would entail two steps: DOGE <> BTC and BTC <> DASH. iDEX conducts the trade automatically, with the extra stages hidden in the background. It opens the door to easy inter-exchange arbitrage, amongst other things.

Implications

The implications of InstantDEX for the cryptocurrency ecosystem are far-reaching. This is the first time that such exceptional software has been released. It enables trading between cryptocurrencies without undue exposure to centralised exchanges, minimising the risk of theft whilst taking advantage of their liquidity; it reduces costs, in many cases making trading almost free; and it removes the requirements for KYC if desired. This is powerful, decentralised software, much-needed if crypto is to retain its independence and hold true to its ideals of decentralisation, and it’s out in the wild.

The new iDEX-enabled BTCD client can be downloaded from https://mega.nz/#!A81RGZab!0i4pVxWc27m1U11AXw0AZnsZ9HeAyEQoTfCyNbW3LAw

Feedback and support can be found on the BTCD bitcointalk forum and on the BTCD SuperNET Slack channel.

Invite available at http://slackinvite.supernet.org/

Source: https://bitscan.com/articles/bitcoindark-integrates-instantdex-decentralised-trading-engine

Author: Cassius