Nine months ago, the Blocknet and VSA Partners struck up a relationship which has defined the course of making our technology intuitively usable and visible to the world. Then, in November, we revealed the design of our UI. Now, we are thrilled to make this UI available in the first beta release of our decentralized exchange, Block DX. We know the community has been really looking forward to this release and getting their hands on the new UI. We have been very much excited ourselves! There are a few last items that still need to be taken care of for us to be comfortable calling this release a Beta. After working towards them the past few days and now having a better understanding, we anticipate we will have a Beta release ready in about a week. However, we do have a release ready now with the UI which can be treated as an updated Alpha release.

API

Along with the UI, this release includes something equally significant: a trading API.

APIs are central to the success of an exchange, as they allow third parties to integrate to it, enabling everything from other trading apps to be built, automated trading, and of course, bots. Interestingly enough, our own UI runs off the API, so you can be assured that, moving forward, it will be well-maintained and will offer a full feature set.

Arguably most importantly, with our API comes support for trading bots on Block DX. It’s not widely known, but bots are the lifeblood of liquidity on exchanges. They help to close the bid-ask spread, they are the fastest makers, and they add the volume required for human traders to find good prices and experience minimal slippage. Our API is decentralized: connecting to Block DX is over localhost, so there’s no risk of exposure of information over the internet. Anyone may build and run a bot, with no permission required from anyone, and with no need to request API keys from a third party. Gotta love decentralization!

Beta: trade with caution

Please remember that this is a beta release, and can therefore be expected to have bugs. We suggest you trade cautiously and avoid trading large amounts of capital at a time. Please join Discord, watch the #bugs channel for news, and receive the latest updates from the community. We believe that decentralized exchange technology is going to change the financial landscape fundamentally, so we encourage you to keep your finger on the pulse.

Features

The Block DX beta is not the fully-featured release that you can expect once we reach production readiness. It includes the features necessary for basic trading, to allow us to test the technology stack before moving forward to a more sophisticated implementation. The features included with this release are:

The creation of orders to trade one coin for another

A candle chart

A depth chart

An order book

Known bugs & Feedback

Now that the UI has been released, we encourage everyone to report all bugs and issues you are finding — don’t be shy, many of these are already known by us internally, but we want to make sure we get as much feedback as possible to make sure that every bug is addressed. Please submit all feedback here: https://blocknetsupport.cayzu.com/Tickets/Create

or join our discord feedback channel: https://discordapp.com/invite/2e6s7H8. Improvements will continue for both functionality and ease of use and your feedback will help greatly in this process! This is a beta — SO PLEASE TRADE WITH CAUTION.

Features to come

Here is a short list of what we’re working on for future Block DX releases:

TradingView charting and technical analysis suite

Limit and market orders

Trade history

Trade history API

Improved order matching and trade fee system

Automated configuration (automated integration of your wallets)

Ethereum and ERC20 support

SPV wallet (no need to download full blockchains)

Multiwallet (the simplicity of keeping all/most of your coins in a single wallet dapp)

The integration of a few leading stablecoins

The integration of third party sources of liquidity (e.g. Bitfinex)

And further off:

Stop orders

Offline orders (that is, orders that persist even if you go offline)

p2p margin trading

API development for general-purpose inter-chain services (that is, more than just decentralized exchange)

Updates to the blockchain router, including early proposals for inter-chain interoperability standards

Download

Below are the downloads for the wallets and Block DX installs needed: https://github.com/BlocknetDX/blockdx-ui/releases

Quick Set up Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rcvX-rWSly7_e3HawTmJ-YPWyBXK55-XacUlHB6Uz9Y/edit

In depth Set up Guide: https://github.com/BlocknetDX/blocknet-docs/blob/master/blocknetDXtrader-setup.md

In the meantime, you can view the new website here and enjoy the Blocknet Introductory video:

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