Welcome to the newsletter from the team at Chainbeat! The web 3.0 ecosystem is growing rapidly. Our goal with this newsletter is to provide insights and highlights on new and interesting projects that are building the decentralized future of tomorrow.
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This week’s featured web 3.0 project: Tokenlon
Tokenlon is a trustless decentralized exchange based on the 0x protocol made by the imToken team. Tokenlon as an independent DEX is fairly new to space. I had not heard about Tokenlon until last week when I watched this video:
Tokenlon Official Website | Trustless token - to - token exchange, based on the 0x protocol
Zap! A decentralized financial product marketed this way with all this energy and momentum was interesting to watch. To understand this style of marketing we have to take a step back and think about the target audience - Chinese crypto users. China(and Asia) has been far ahead in using mobile phones as a primary medium for all activities. The same trend applies to blockchain. For example, here is a screenshot of a slide(blurry) from DevCon5 comparing the usage of imToken(mobile) with Metamask(desktop) across apps.
Tokenlon’s decentralized exchange is based on 0x and with a design focused on preventing front-running and trade collisions. Some of the product highlights include:
Fast to trade: Off-chain quotations present final prices that can be finalized within one block.
Easy to use: As the user sees what they get, using a one-click interface.
Cheap: As ERC20 sell orders are realized through gas fewer transactions
More secure: As tokens trade wallet-to-wallet through via on-chain atomic swap
A demo video from the Tokenlon team:
Data Insights
Here is the trading volume data for the last 5-days from DexWars.
Here is a Tokenlon dashboard from Chainbeat depicting usage and orders fulfilled from August 1, 2019.
A few data highlights:
Before Tokenlon settled on using one platform(0x) they offered two platform options to its users - 0x as a relayer and an option directly via Kyber. Now they do almost 1/3rd of the Kyber volume just on 0x.
Around 394 users(out of 19,096 users) have done 10 transactions or more in this time period
Top 5 whale users responsible for ~35% of transaction volume. Tokenlon rewards (rich prizes per their marketing material) for high volume traders
Nov 11,12 spike is due to Alibaba singles day — marketing-driven once again with special rewards and prizes for trades that day
Being an offshoot of imToken definitely helps with the gaining initial user traction
Our Thoughts
The biggest credit to Tokenlon is its user-centric web 3.0 design. They understand their user base and had a chance to study the behavioral patterns and categorize the use cases that its users cared about. This is reflected in their onboarding, ease-of-use and functionality offering. An example, how they provide current comparison rates from top exchanges at the moment of decision making to reinforce its users that they are providing their best rate, so it’s not needed to open up other apps to compare rates.
Tokenlon was accused of fake trading volumes by one of its competitors. It's often difficult to validate these claims but its something that our whole industry needs to handle by being more transparent in order to improve trust.
There are still ways to go for these decentralized exchanges. Just this week, a user lost $120K because an exchange did not realize the precision difference between two currencies. A limit order on OasisDEX did not realize that USDC has only 6 decimals and DAI has 18. Here is the transaction info in case you are interested.
The blockchain innovation from Asia has been fascinating. But it sometimes gets lost in translation. There are a lot of things that the rest of the world can learn from Asia like for example developing user-centric mobile DApps.
Links
Website
Tokenlon News
imToken News
About Chainbeat
Chainbeat aims to be the first cross-platform analytics platform for applications building the decentralized web 3.0. We believe that web 3.0 will be built across many different blockchain platforms and providing data insights will benefit everyone involved in these platforms with a new way of looking at things.
We provide advanced analytics features that help enable cross-platform benchmarking and reporting across blockchain platforms.
We provide real-time data insights and alerts that can help you with fast decision making to help grow your business.
We currently have integrations with Ethereum, RSK, PoA, and xDAI (in staging). We are working on adding Tron next.
To learn more, visit https://chainbeat.io
We will be taking a break for Thanksgiving next week. If you are working on new and interesting projects in the web 3.0 space and would like it to be covered in this newsletter, email us at {info at chainbeat dot io}