Project title: Tradedirect.io
Summary:
Tradedirect.io is a peer to peer escrow website to buy and sell Lumens and other Stellar assets for fiat currency.
Goals:
Enable all people to buy and sell Lumens and other Stellar assets from other people without having to use a cryptocurrency exchange.
Description:
Tradedirect.io is based on Localbitcoins. We aim to do for the Stellar ecosystem what Localbitcoins does for bitcoin.
That provides people with the option to buy and sell lumens and other stellar tokens for fiat currency without having to use a cryptocurrency exchange.
The project has been in development for a year already and we are nearing a first version which I am confident we can release to the general public.
Here is a list of functionality that is working as we speak:
- User signup/profile management
- Users can create advertisements
- Advertisements can be fixed price
- Advertisements can also follow market price with an offset. For example, you can create an advertisement to sell XLM that follows the market price
- or - X percent. Tradedirect will automatically recalculate the actual price every 15 minutes. This way you don't have to constantly update advertisement prices.
- Users can search advertisements
- Users can message each other when they are in a trade
- Once a user is interested in an advertisement he can start a trade with the owner of that advertisement. When both parties agree
on the price and terms the trade is initiated. The party that is selling the cryptocurrency now has to deposit the agreed amount into our escrow wallet.
Once the other party has made the payment according to terms tradedirect releases the funds from the escrow wallet and the trade is concluded.
Currently, there are 2 limits on the trading volume:
- a single trade can have a max value of 500 USD.
- The 2 weeks rolling average of your trades can be a maximum of 2000 USD.
The reason for these restrictions is that we do not want to get in trouble with money laundering laws or anything.
In the future, we aim to implement a KYC feature for the users that want higher limits. See the roadmap below.
Link: https://www.tradedirect.io , our github is privately hosted for the moment.
Roadmap:
Now that the basic functionality of the application is done we have several improvements targeted that we want to make in the future.
No hard dates are set for this right now as we are a very small software shop. Some of the things we aim to implement are:
- KYC verification for higher trading limits
- Support functionality to remediate conflicts in trades
- A full rebuild of the user interface
Additional stuff:
Tradedirect is a project that has been ongoing for quite a while. Certain technology choices were made in the past which now severely limit us on a couple of things.
We are aware that the look and feel of things feels a bit outdated. Because of the choices made in the past it is not easy to change this right now.
Also, our main developer ( me...) is a backend / devops guy so ui design is hard for me 🙂
Should we secure funding through the SCF or any other means we plan to use part of these funds to have the frontend redesigned and rebuild from scratch.
Q & A:
Can you add tokens other than XLM?
- Yes, the backend was designed in a way that we only need to add a trust line in the escrow wallet to a new token and enable it in our backend.
Why do you ask for my private keys?
- For the escrow process, we need the seller of cryptocurrency to sign a transaction with his private key. This process is designed in a way
that the entire transaction signing is done in the frontend in javascript. So your private key is never sent to our servers so we will never have access to your wallet in any way.
Are you really sure that you don't use my private key?
- We are willing to let independent people from the stellar community audit our code. Our code is privately hosted at the moment but if this is a concern
we are definitely willing to make changes and let people from the community audit the code.
