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.
  • tavi replied to this.
    a month later

    Garth
    Hi there.

    In the near future I would be interested in using your escrow services regarding transactions based on a Stellar token I am currently developing. Is escrow provided in your own wallet? Are there any charges for the service?

    Regards,

    tavi

    tavi@centytoken.com

        18 days later

        tavi Hi Tavi,
        the wallet on our website is pretty basic and rudimentary. The main goal of the website is that we act as a trusted middle party ( so we hold the funds in escrow ) until both parties agree that fiat payment has been made and the tokens can be released from the escrow account to the buyer. We are still in beta versions of the site so fee's are 0 for the moment. When we are sattisfied with the quality of the application we will release it to the general public. Should we accuire funding from SCF we can keep fee's at 0 otherwise we will probably implement a small fee to account for operating costs.

        • tavi replied to this.

            BasMoorkens

            Hi Bas,

            Thank you for responding. My project too is under development, even though the token is up and running. So, I will keep you posted when I will be closer to implementation, AND, we might even consider helping you with funding in order to speed up your escrow service development. Meanwhile, since I am a firm believer in P2P services, if you would consider adding a CENTY/XLM pair exchange to you website, please let me know.

            Regards, Tavi

                tyvdh changed the title to Tradedirect.io .

                tavi Tavi,
                the setup of our backend is done in a way that makes it pretty easy for us to add new Stellar based assets to the site. We currently only support coins / fiat though. So CENTY / XLM would require more effort on our part ( though if there is a real demand I can always look into it )

                • tavi replied to this.

                    Haven't been here in a while. Thanks admin for your corrections. Tavi I look forward to learning more about your project.

                    • tavi replied to this.

                      BasMoorkens

                      BasMoorkens
                      At CENTY's end, there is limited demand for XLM, for now. It would be a nice service to offer future customers the option of exchanging CENTY for any Stellar assets since we don't care to operate on/or an exchange, other than our CENTY/USD.

                          Garth

                          Hi Garth. In a nutshell, I'm working on developing a social network integrated with a P2P marketplace, all based on CENTY.

                            You should be able to use tradedirect, without modification, to trade CENTY with any stellar asset. Only stellar assets are held in escrow. So you can buy or sell with whatever you agree to with the person you are trading with. Once the transaction is complete the stellar asset is released. Do you have a link to your site?

                              Garth

                              That sounds good! What is your escrow service price? Please keep in mind that I am planning ahead right know, so it would be at least 1-2 month before using your services. I'm at https://centytoken.com/. Please send me a short message so I can have you on file for further communication. And, if you wish, take advantage of our (modest) 350 CENTY giveaway 😀

                                We are not sure on the price at the moment. It will likely be free in the beginning. After that it might be in the neighborhood of one dollar per trade.