As early proponents of the Ethereum blockchain, we imagined a world where stock exchanges could exist on the Ethereum blockchain without the need for a clearing firm or a settlement house. Trades would just be matched and cleared on a blockchain. Say goodbye to old-school clearing.
But despite the potential benefits of such a scheme, there are some serious usability issues that can’t be ignored. Matching orders will take minutes to confirm and the complexity of implementing a matching algorithm as a smart contract will, at best, result in many partial order fills that take more than sixty seconds to confirm. It all makes for a bad customer experience.
When building Tradefor, we concluded that a positive user experience is something that either makes or breaks any application designed for the mass market. Consequently, we built Tradefor’s front end using eminently-scalable Node.js. But we didn’t want to completely walk away from Ethereum, so we decided to use Ethereum as a means of providing an immutable ledger of electronic assets assigned to our users AFTER the trade has been executed.
In short, we built a hybrid Ethereum exchange. Holdings are updated on the Ethereum blockchain every six hours. Whereas, we admit that we are not a pure DAPP, we are able to deliver many blockchain benefits while providing a very unique and engaging trading experience. We can distribute any electronic asset, including gift cards and coin tokens, on the Ethereum public blockchain.
We will leave the pure exchange model to the purists.