The DX is already 100% working and you can trade BTC, LTC and SYS RIGHT NOW without a central exchange.
Stealth, Bay and hopefully Zcash following soon. Plus some others that that will be revealed in due course.
That statement is sort of true, but could be misleading because as far as I know you can only trade with other parties who are also running a wallet on the Blocknet test_net. Real open party trading will begin with the wallet code fork and activation of the DX on the Blocknet main_net.
No, real, live trades are occurring already.
The upcoming software release will bring OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to the Blocknet's mainnet. This is in order for our service nodes to begin to function and receive real trade fees. (Currently they only receive testnet fees.)