I can definitely see where the confusion came from, I'm going to revise the UI in the next few days whenever I need a short break from coding. Exchanges will not be enabled in the beginning of alpha testing, we will be incrementally rolling out the features that we have for testers and keeping track of any issues that need to be fixed. The point of this, as criptix said in his update post, is that there are many individual parts (the escrow / multisig functionality for example) which when combined allow for the decentralized cross chain ledger that is described in our documentation. In order to properly test them, they need to be tested individually rather than as a group so that issues are easier to hunt down.

Anyone wanting to know the basics of how/what the entire project is please take a look at our website: http://atomicdac.org/ you will find documentation, links to a few news articles that have been written about ATOMIC, and you can join the mailing list to get an email update whenever something important happens with ATOMIC.

Any questions you have left after reading the documentation feel free to post again here, pm me or hunt down my email address

~CryptAxe