NiceTrade: Social Trading Platform with Secure Trading Terminal

umbrel Great question. But I think it applies to pretty much all Stellar projects not just exchanges. Exchanges at least seem to have enough residual value that people are willing to buy them. But nicetrade will not be just another exchange. Exchange is the foundation level of functionality that is generally useful for a platform app. We're actually building towards high level functionalities like social trading and there are multiple ways to pivot.

Even at the exchange level, there are several possibilities which are not obvious in a bear market. Anchoring is the obvious answer, but we're probably not going there without partnering with a financial entity. Other ideas are whitelabel services for token issuers to create their own custom portals. As we get more users, we could also do bidding based text advertisements.

But in general we run very lean, and we could do a lot with few resources for a long time. Hopefully you could tell by how much functionality has already been built into nicetrade. An average SCF prize would give nicetrade at least a year worth of run way to keep building stuff. We could always pivot if needed.

Justin Currently there are 3-ish active Stellar exchanges. Not sure where the number 100 came from. Also not sure if you've used any of the other exchanges. I have- StellarTerm, Interstellar.exchange, Stellarport, and StellarX. I am intimately familiar with the pros and cons of each. I guess I'm a different breed of Stellar user and have many Stellar accounts to keep track of and trade with. I like my account history clean and keep track of my trading results. So the exchange capabilities of nicetrade caters to a different type of user base that will grow as Stellar matures. nicetrade has a lot of differentiating features and it will have a lot more.

I agree volume and SDEX are pivotal differentiators for Stellar. The only thing that increases market volume for sure are market makers who provide liquidity. The next best thing are retail traders who seed the orderbooks. Having more Stellar exchanges that cater to their individual preferences could only help. The exchange is such a fundamental aspect of Stellar that having more competition can't hurt and would only drive more innovation.

Finally I already mentioned this in the entry. But nicetrade's final form is not going to be yet another exchange. I don't want to reveal too many details on this but if you're really interested I could talk about it on keybase- dexter0x8

Following through on our short term goal, we have implemented a new scoring mechanism for Stellar assets based on liquidity. As much as we can tell, nicetrade the first exchange to do this. Liquidity scoring offers more protection against manipulation compared to trading volume only. It's easy to fake volume because there is nothing for the malicious actor to lose. Faking liquidity on the other hand involves staking their own XLM into the order books. Now there is a lot more for the malicious actor to lose , especially over a long period of time.

Liquidity is obviously also very important to users who trade on the exchange. With all else being equal, assets that are more historically liquid are safer.

To produce this scoring we sample each asset periodically to measure their liquidity depth against a preset benchmark. Each asset's liquidity score is computed based on a time weighted average of historical liquidity. Therefore to achieve a high score, an asset must have been liquid for some time.

nicetrade tries to make asset listing and ranking as fair as possible through purely automated mechanisms. The new ranking system now ranks by liquidity first and trade volume (in terms of XLM) second.

As a companion to this update, we also improved the user interface for nicetrade. We have built a a sleek new Markets Overview page:

We have also re-skinned our exchange and wallet for a more modern feel. Traditionally we have prioritized functionality over looks, but given feedback we have received we are also working towards being more user friendly.

Got something you want to see improved? Let me know!

New NiceTrade Update - We're starting to roll out the second layer of NiceTrade which is primarily focused on social trading. Our goal is to make trading on Stellar more fun and to improve DEX liquidity through interest from individual traders.

Our first social feature is inspired by StockTwits but with a distinctly Stellar twist. Users can express sentiments and share bits of salient info on assets they're trading. Because NiceTrade comes built in with a powerful exchange, there will be many interesting features:

• Trade mirroring where users can easily replicate the trades of their favorite gurus.
• Transaction parsing to showcase profit or loss from trades.
• Tipping for good advice,

We'll also be piloting a social trading competition for XLM holders. The goal is to see who can grow the XLM value of their accounts the most in a month. Anyone is welcome to compete. Simply register an account that has 100XLM and NiceTrade will track the leaderboard. At the end of the month, the top 3 traders with the most profit splits a prize pool.

Please see this page for more details:
https://nicetrade.co/competition/rules

If you're interested to donating to the prize pool please let me know. We could add your logo to the leaderboard as a sponsor.

umbrel Thanks for the feedback. Yes that's the type of behavior I was trying to prevent by limiting the markets. I'll pare the list some more before enrollment starts. The leaderboard will show the profit/ROI and value chart for each account and accounts with the highest ROI will naturally attract attention. Enrolled accounts will be publicly visible so if this turns into abuse it could be spotted by looking at trade history.

Yes we can add USDT to the list of assets. Regarding donations I'll publish an account before enrollment starts. I'm also available on Keybase as dexter0x8 if you want to get in touch.

dexter Trading competition is live. To enroll you'll need to authenticate via SEP-10 (login using username/password, secret key, or Cosmic Link). Easiest way is probably to create a wallet. We're piloting this idea to get people interested and acquainted with Stellar's exchange and we'll be making improvements along the way.

https://nicetrade.co/competition/leaderboard

Once you login you can set an avatar and website (if you want to do a little self marketing).

You need a Stellar account with 100XLM balance to enroll. The prize pool currently stands at 500 XLM to be split to the 6 most profitable traders: 40% - 20% - 10% - 10% - 10% - 10% after competition ends.

To prevent cheating, competitors may only trade markets with whitelisted assets listed in Rules. We have added a competition filter (trophy icon) in the exchange. Please see Rules for all the details.

Donations to the prize pool are welcomed, please send to the address listed on the leaderboard:
GCT7WKPSBTVMXZDRSVCHT5P32VPAL2FLDAIHAAMZBOLU737LDS7U3YXI

If you want to be listed as a sponsor please let me know. If you donate and want to show a logo, please send me a link to the image.

New version of NiceTrade has been released:

NiceTrade now support a convenient username/password authentication alongside new wallet creation. There is a new profile section where you can change username and add avatar. We have fixed a SEP-10 authentication issue with CosmicLink integration.

NiceTrade supports multiples ways login:

• Username/Password (SEP-10 Authentication)
• Public Address, Federation Address, or Keybase Username
• Secret Key (SEP-10 Authentication)
• Cosmic Link (SEP-10 Authentication )

Improvements to NiceTrade's Trading Terminal

• Support custom market selection
• Support reversing asset pair
• Allow searching for markets by asset issuer name

Improvements to Multi-Account Manager
We have also added better back button handling so you can go back to previous account balances, offers, effects, etc...

Social Trading
We have also started the trading competition pilot. Competition leaderboard is periodically updated with profit metrics and ranking of the competitors. You can browse each competitor's entry to see what trades they have made. There will be more improvements in this area in the future.

Thanks to all who have provided feedback. We will continue to make NiceTrade better and get more people trading on Stellar's Distributed Exchange.

New version of NiceTrade has been released 5/10:

• Introduced Account Types and direct SEP-7 support. This enables different secondary accounts to have different default signing options. The Keybase account type now default directly to SEP-7 for signing transactions. This provides a more optimal user experience for trading with Keybase.
• Optimized app load time (approximately 50 - 100% speedup)
• App received another cosmetic face lift with improved typography and display for numbers.
• Fixed display issues that affected very small decimals (for markets like inverse BTC/XLM)
• Improved trade grouping in Trade History
• General bug fixes

Thanks to all who have provided feedback. We will continue to improve NiceTrade and get more people on Stellar!

NiceTrade Update 5/16

We have improved the user experience for the user when he/she is waiting for transaction confirmation. There is now a spinning indicator and a pending transaction tracker:

This change gets us closer to an ideal user experience that is completely non-blocking- the user should be able to continue using the app while a transaction is being confirmed in the background. This feels faster and more responsive than the modal spinner used by Stellar exchanges today.

Once we implement channel accounts this will be fully possible. The user will be able to submit multiple offers in quick succession and continue using the app while they're processed in the background.

We have fixed an issue where Account page was not showing for public key (non-authenticated) logins.

We have also added support for issuing assets and manually adding trustlines. For more info, please check out this tutorial on issuing assets on NiceTrade.