Hey guys,
Just wanted to introduce myself - I’m currently in the process of building the first exchange for Grin.
I’m hoping to have something up in the coming weeks for people to test out with testnet coins.
Would love to have everyone’s opinion and have them stress test the exchange.
Let me know if there are any features you would like to see!
What would be exchanged? Testnet1 for Testnet2 coins?
Thought of doing it trustlessly with atomic swaps? Seems doable with Ethereum at least.
Right now I’m thinking 2 possible scenarios for while the exchange is in “testing mode”
When you join the exchange during this phase you will be given X number of “testnet” bitcoins. They will simply be used to test the buying and selling of Grin, but the Grin will be need to be real testnet2 grin coins.
Just be given both fake bitcoin and grincoin to test the facilities of the exchange.
I will likely implement Scenario 2 before scenario 1 - whether or not I open it up for beta testers other than myself at that point is another question.
Would love to, but I think there are a number of projects looking to do this already (not for grin specifically). If there is more demand for that than a central exchange to help get Grin off the ground - I would certainly be happy to start working on that.
I’m only aware of 2 types decentralized exchange projects:
The issue I see with the current approach on the 2nd is that they’re trying to concurrence existing centralized exchanges and boil the ocean by supporting too many coins. For atomic swaps, this is hard. So I see an opportunity in starting on a newer coin (like Grin), making it work well for one specific pair (say grin <> ether) and going from there.
Atomic swap based exchanges. This doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Lets wait and see if lightning network atomic swaps start working soonish?
I trade on an exchange because I trust one more than the raw fee’s are worth and the risk of tether I view as worse than holding usd on a non-tether exchange.
If fee’s drop to the cost of sending onion messages and maintaining a virus-free server, that will be competing with centralized exanages, in a way that flooding the bitcoin blockchain with heavy transaction just won’t.
The only time I’ve used a coin swap exchange was for a very marco trade of bch->btc, in such a trade as that I didn’t care about high fee’s or losing a percentage to arbitrage; it was an exception to the rule, you need a trading evernment to have mircotraders bots to have the volume to make any trades a good idea
This was somewhat along my thinking as well - I’d love to implement lightning network atomic swaps when they grow more mature, but in the meantime it seems as though centralized exchanges hold more volume (for non-erc20 tokens that is).
If a lightning network-esque exchange could be built akin to Etherdelta, I would definitely start working on implementing that as well.
If you do it keep me updated, I will be a customer.
It probably makes more sense to implement a microservice for managing Grin coins so that it can be easily integrated by existing centralized exchange players.
100% with Igno, atomic swap DEX with one trading pair to start would be ultimate infrastructure boon early on. Was thinking there could be checkboxes for fully optional fees that go to development as well.
does cryptobridge use atomic swaps? Not clear on their homepage how they manage to allow trades between different blockchains. As far as I know this is a "hard’ problem and it would be big news to see they had solved it.
What about https://bisq.network ? P2P over TOR with arbitrators for resolving disputes.
With the initial rate of inflation, many will see a high price (due to low stock to flow ratio) and dive in, getting hurt by the certain downward price movement as the market matures.
The longer the wait for the first ‘exchange’, the better liquidity will be, the lower inflation will be, the less people will get hurt by the initial price drop.
@Grinners are you saying Grin would be best launched with no exchange support? That’s an interesting view.
I doubt it will happen, because if there’s money to be made, people will make it. But yes, as there were no exchanges when Bitcoin first launched, I don’t think it would do any harm, and ultimately help.
Plus while it is not as clear that Grin is profitable to the masses to mine, Nicehash GPU’s won’t immediately flood the chain 
When a rush occurs to buy those first coins (when less than 100,000 are even in existence), the market would look absurd, and vastly overpriced, and every man and his dog will dive in and start mining, and ride the price crash down.
Isn’t that how its usually done?
I’ve never watched a coin launch but I’m a speculator and most shitcoins don’t make it to real markets (you can check coin cap and skip 20 pages in; it rapidly gets sad and scamy and horrible) so my theory is there is at least some point in time were its a market maker on a forum with a reputation trading manually
edit// Speaking of manually trading; should there be a thread for building up knowledge of semi-trusted public keys?
Creating a manual blockchain, where you take the identity information of the person above you and sign it trusting the forums anti-spam and history keeping it so theres only one so we can have 100 or so names of people who cared enough about grin to be here now to make the early days of trading easier
Having access to the website through TOR would match the project’s privacy focus
If you don’t know Bisq please have a look to it:
It is the only privacy protecting, decentralized P2P Fiat exchange out there. No KYC, all traffic routed over Tor (hidden services), Bitcoin Multisig and double security deposit for securing the trade. Bitcoin to Fiat or Bitcoin to any Altcoin.
Bisq would love to add Grin in the upcoming release (in 3 days).
We have a simple process where the altcoin developers can make a pull request with add the coin and an address validation.
https://docs.bisq.network/exchange/howto/list-asset.html
Would be great if a Grin developer could make a PR (otherwise I do it myself but not familiar with address format - so please provide some pointers to address validation rules).
There are no addresses in Grin so it’s probably not going to be trivial to integrate it in Bisq.