Project title: Tradedirect.io

Summary: Tradedirect.io is an escrow service for Stellar assets. It is similar to localbitcoins.com and facilitates peer to peer trades between fiat currencies and stellar assets.

Goals: The primary goal is to provide an easy way for people anywhere in the world to safely execute a person to person trade between fiat currencies and Stellar Assets through an escrow service. Tradedirect.io will function as said escrow service.
We want to provide an easy to use service and provide excellent customer support in order to make it as easy and secure for people to buy and sell Lumens and other Stellar assets.

Description: Tradedirect.io is an escrow service that facilitates trades between fiat currencies and Stellar tokens.
Trades between participants always start off by having the seller put the requested amount of the Stellar asset into our escrow wallet. Once the assets are in escrow, the buyer and seller can arrange for fiat payment. This can be done either through meeting in person or by completing fiat payment online. Once the fiat payment is done the agreed upon Stellar based assets can be claimed by the buyer into their Stellar wallet.

We have several use cases in mind where the Tradedirect.io platform can provide an added value over existing platforms:

Tradedirect.io provides a fiat to Stellar gateway for people who otherwise have no access to this option.
Tradedirect.io allows users to buy and sell Lumens and other Stellar tokens on the SDEX without having to deal with bitcoin as an intermediary token. This lowers the barrier entry for new users into the crypto ecosystem.
Tradedirect.io supports all Stellar based assets. This means that users can directly buy any token issued on the Stellar blockchain which can be great for future ICO’s using Stellar.
Tradedirect.io does collect KYC information. It is not mandatory for an escrow service like this but we are trying to serve the Stellar community and do not want to facilitate money laundering in any way.
Tradedirect.io commits to providing support for its users. We keep detailed history of every trade and all events that occur and we commit ourselves to resolve any disputes that should arise during trades if any would arise of course.

For our submissions into the SDF contest, we aim to have a fully working web application.

In the future, we aim to add several new features to our platform including:

A decentralized chat support system to aid users in using the application and to resolve disputes
Mobile friendly web application / mobile app
More extensive wallet interface
Tutorials
Marketing

In order to make the application as fast as possible and to help out the Stellar network we are running our own validator node ( can be found under tradedirect.io ).
Our operational costs to run all this are coming out of our own back pockets at the moment. We are planning on charging a small fee for using the service to help cover these costs. In this regard, we could really use some help with funding from the SCF in order to keep this fee minimal and to help us reach our future goals.

Links:https://www.tradedirect.io/

Team: Bas Moorkens is a software developer and cloud architect from Belgium. In his day job, he works as a consultant working mostly on enterprise software and cloud platforms.
He has a great interest in blockchain development and especially into Stellar. He believes that Stellar has the potential to revolutionize the way banking works in the future. He’s also a big fan of the Stellar developer community and the developer friendliness of the blockchain.

Garth Wells joined the Stellar community from the very start and is a fan of the of decentralized blockchains that don’t use mining. From outward appearances, it appears things have slowed a little but Garth is confident that many years from now Stellar will still be standing and providing a very useful service to the world of financial transactions. It is really great to get finally get Tradedirect.io out the door and it will be even better continuing to improve it in the nearest future.

17 days later

Hi, I'm the main technical guy behind this project and since we are still in full development I'm gonna be posting an update here every now and then when there's something interesting to mention.
We have been hard at work these last few weeks and we are nearing a first release that's ready for beta testers.
So far following functionality now works:

  • add / view wallets
  • Create advertisements
  • Search advertisements
  • Respond to an advertisement and start a trade
  • Send funds to escrow wallet

Our goal is now to finish up the remaining steps in the escrow process in the next 2 weeks.
Once that's done we are ready to start of with beta testing.
We had some minor hiccups the last few days because our stellar-core node was misbehaving. ( we are running our own node and horizon instance)
So we decided to just bite the bullet and wipe everything from core and horizon and upgrade to the latest version. Both are syncing with the Stellar network as we speak.
Hit me up if you have any questions.
Bas

7 days later

Another week has passed, time for another update.
I'm pleased to report that I finished core functionality this last week.
The trading process looks like this right now:
User A posts an advertisement to sell XLM.
User B responds to the add to buy 100 XLM and this starts a trade.
User A has to deposit 100 XLM in the escrow wallet.
User B gets to see the payment instructions from user A and once he has paid can confirm that he has paid.
User A now gets notified that paymnet has been made. Once he has received payment he can confirm this.
User B can now withdraw the 100 XLM from the escrow wallet.

This week we will be running tests within our team to see how well the system behaves and if we have all edge cases covered. After that we will probably reach out to the community in hopes of finding some beta testers.
I will set trading fee's to 0 when we are ready to begin with that.

Also, If you are a skilled designer and would like to contribute reach out to me as I'm not much of a designer 🙂

19 days later

I like localbitcoins.com, all the best to establish something similiar for Stellar.

    Thanks for the votes Generate007 and smartstellar. It is encouraging to get a little support.

      smartstellar thx for your vote! Sadly we wont have everything done by end of this contest so...When the time comes would you be interested in helping us test out the site?

      Generate007 Thx for the vote! Sadly we won't be ready by end of this contest. Would you be interested in helping us test the site when we feel we are ready?

      12 days later