The Dether mission

More than a simple blockchain, Ethereum offers promising opportunities, enabling anyone to access and interact with decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts.

Looking back at 2018, the number of dApps built of top of Ethereum and released on mainnet has exploded. Although there is a lot to come before using a dApp becomes as commonplace as using Uber or Airbnb, we’ve begun collectively building the basic infrastructures and protocols for that to happen.

As a result, having easy access to the Ethereum blockchain, dApps, and thus ether, should be as simple as possible for everyone. However, centralized crypto exchanges make it difficult for four main reasons:

It takes time and costs money. Registering online, depositing money and getting verified takes a long time. And time is money. Decentralization is at the core of blockchains value proposition; yet, central entities still play a major role in the process of buying cryptocurrencies. The overly complex buying process creates barriers to Ethereum mass adoption, as more than 2 billion adults are unbanked and don’t have the necessary bank account to buy ether. The last mile issue in cryptocurrency transactions has yet to be solved: how to transform cryptocurrency into cash in only minutes.

That’s why we created Dether.

Dether is a decentralized OTC network of ether buyers and sellers all over the world.

Our belief is that the beauty and power of the Ethereum technology should be easily accessible to all. We’ve decided to build a trustless solution that will allow individuals to be able to interact with the Ethereum blockchain without the need for a middleman.

What can a dApp do with the Dether protocol?

Using the Dether protocol, your dApp will be able to:

Register new points of sale in the Dether protocol. Similarly to 0x’s protocol model, you will have the ability to register new ether sellers into the Dether protocol by yourself. This will give your dApp the ability to offer your users a way to make extra revenue by becoming a crypto point of exchange. Get sellers from the Dether protocol. Similar to an API, you will be able to load the list of ether sellers and shops registered in the Dether protocol. Your users will be able to locate the closest ether sellers around them and shops accepting cryptocurrency displayed on the Dether map in order to get in touch with them and transact. You will be able to freely build your own front-end on top of the Dether protocol to easily add cash-in and cash-out services to your dApp. List your token on the Dether protocol*. By staking DTH and by providing enough liquidity, Dether sellers will be able to sell your token for fiat currency all over the world. (*using a third party liquidity provider).

I’m a dApp developer — why should I use the Dether protocol?

For each teller that will register through your dApp, you’ll have the possibility to earn 0.X% of fee on each of their trade. This will happen directly through the smart contract.

Or, you could simply show your user how they could buy your token locally by displaying point of sell load from the smart contract.

In which countries will I be able to propose a cash-to-crypto service in my dApp? What currencies will I have?

Dether is currently available in 140 countries. The full list is available at the end of this blog post. (So if you are building a dApp that targets individuals or businesses located in at least one of these countries, don’t forget to sign up below).

We currently support 15 fiat currencies and will extend the list every month. Don’t hesitate to send us an email at hello@dether.io if you would like us to list a particular fiat currency for your dApp.

How will it work?

A new DetherJS library entirely rebuilt in typescript will be available with all the functions needed to interact directly with the new Dether smart contracts.

The two main functions will be:

RegisterSeller: add a new seller on the Dether map GetSeller: get all the sellers located in a given area

The protocol will be fully open. As a consequence, any dApp will be able to register sellers into the Dether protocol. As a dApp that’s using the Dether protocol, you will have the ability to choose:

the countries and/or regions where you are operating your services to/from, by allowing access to only those you want

whether your users can see all the sellers displayed on the map or only those registered by selected dApps or users that pass a KYC process (if you or any other dApp chooses to implement one to register new sellers into the Dether protocol)

Why a protocol?

More than a mobile app, Dether is a network of individuals and businesses willing to buy and sell ether and ERC20 tokens, directly.

Launching the Dether app as a first step enabled us to onboard buyers and sellers within the Dether app and protocol. Similarly to other protocols built on top of Ethereum, the border between a product and a protocol becomes fuzzy when it comes to helping other dApps benefit from a network of users that is being built.

Today, many projects and teams are building decentralized applications in various industries on top of Ethereum reaching, in most cases, the current crypto community. In the very near future, these applications could easily reach across the globe, to anyone that has internet access.

In order to make that happen, we believe that having an easy way to cash-in cash-out ether and ERC20 tokens is already needed, and will become more and more necessary — not only for the Dether community of users — but by dApps willing to target individuals and businesses located in areas where having an access to financial services, and thus cryptocurrency, is limited. In order to build an increasingly stronger network, we need to facilitate access to it. That’s where the Dether protocol comes in: an open protocol built on top of Ethereum for dApps and crypto projects that share crypto cash-in and cash-out issues.

Where are we now?

Since the launch of the Dether app in August 2018, the first version of the Dether protocol was mostly used by the Dether app directly. With the new version coming, it’s now time to open it to everyone and make it global in order to facilitate crypto adoption worldwide.