Mainnet. – Exchange Union

Mainnet. – Exchange Union

TL;DR: Exchange Union is developing a ⚡️️layer two DEX protocol⚡ that can be used by anyone. Today, we are excited to announce the mainnet release of xud, the first implementation using the DEX protocol. It enables peer discovery, decentralized order matching and instant settlement for the pairs BTC/DAI, LTC/DAI, WETH/BTC & LTC/BTC. All without counterparty risk — no trust required. We invite fellow #reckless bitcoiners & anyone with a beefy computer, patience and tolerance to lose some bucks to try things out and report back.

In the past few months, we worked with the amazingly helpful raiden team to add ERC20 support to the DEX protocol, bringing meaningful stablecoin trading pairs like BTC/DAI to the party. Some weeks ago, we made xud available to be used with the BTC/LTC/ETH testnets, talked about differences to existing DEXes and our vision of one global liquidity pool; read the blog post here. We demoed the first-ever BTC/DAI swap on mainnet and tweeted a braindump on why we do what we do. Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves, sync BTC, LTC & ETH mainnet 👩‍💻 and dig up remaining issues in preparation for 1.0.0-beta.

Get started 👉 here 👈

This guides you through setting up xud-docker, the fastest and easiest way to get a functioning trading environment up and running. It automates various tasks for underlying clients and keeps your system clean — no installation, no special dependencies apart from docker/docker-compose & python (which is temporary and pre-installed on most mainstream distros). It enables you to trade on the following networks:

• Simnet: Private chains which are maintained by us. We’ll automatically open channels to you and push over some coins, you’ll be trading against our bots and anyone else running simnet. It’s the perfect playground to see how things work and play around with xuclicommands. It’s easy: run one script, wait for about 10 minutes and you are ready to go. You want to start with this!
• Testnet: Real-world bitcoin testnet3, litecoin testnet4, ethereum ropsten (yes, these need to be synced!). You’ll need to get some testnet coins from a faucet & open channels to trading partners yourself. Alternatively you can hit us up on discord and we’ll open some channels to you and push over some coins to get you ready.
• Mainnet: The real deal. As precaution we added a $10-per-trade-security-cap 👷. Currently the default setup only supports syncing a fresh ✨ bitcoind, litecoind and geth full node. Your machine will need a >500GB SSD, fast internet and 16GB RAM or more. Geth is very demanding.. Setup time: 24h+

If you already have full nodes available that you want to use in the setup, you always have the option to pull down and build the xud source code and set up dependencies like lnd & raiden yourself. It’s definitely possible (we are running this on a pi), just a bit more challenging 🙇 .

Banner Features 🏅

• Master Password: one seed, one password for all clients and assets
• TOR by default: no port forwarding in your router required, increased privacy
• Swap security & recovery: to bring trading as close to “without counterparty risk — no trust required” as possible
• UX: e.g. openchannel <node_key> btc 0.1 offers a simplified way to open channels using the xud node key, abstracting from lightning/raiden keys & syntax

Read the full release notes 👉 here 👈.

TODO 💪

• Get things stable and secure, e.g. recover swaps when L2 clients (LND, Raiden) crash or otherwise misbehave during a swap
• Automated channel backups
• Allow restoring via master seed
• Allow using existing full nodes via xud-docker
• Allow using light clients via xud-docker
• Allow multi-hop routes for Raiden (already possible on Lightning).
• UI
• Tackle the Free Option Problem
• Make it possible for exchanges to integrate xud into their matching engines and tap into the global liquidity pool
• Many more…

So… the next months won’t be boring. For all issues/questions on the way (and maybe even some mainnet channels with free --push-amt if you ask nicely) — hit us up on Discord!

Happy trading! 🔁 ⚡️

Kilian on behalf of Team Exchange Union

Published at Fri, 04 Oct 2019 15:39:49 +0000

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