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So in other words, you're trying to build something similar to what Thorchain has built? One of the main issues with that service in my opinion, is liquidity. Do you have anything in mind on how you can resolve that issue? or incentivize people to provide liquidity?

Somewhat similar to Thorchain, but it will be a desktop application, not a website.

As far as pricing/liquidity goes, the main issue with Thorchain seems to be the exorbitant fees. Thorchain has no limit orders, and the fees on a market order are typically 0.5% both ways. Hence the terrible liquidity. The Fornash DEX would charge 0.25% to the maker and 0% to the taker.

This DEX will be the only one available where people can trade BTC and DAI for Monero without KYC on a platform that only charges 0.25%. The cheapest other no-KYC platform for Monero is Bisq, and that charges 0.7%, has a complicated, confusing UI, and requires people to lock up 15% of the value of the trade in BTC.

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I would also imagine that this is going to be open source, correct? It's difficult for people to fully trust a service that claims to be non custodial and decentralized, if it's not open source.

Yes, it will be open source.

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Is this a solo project? If yes, then how experienced are you?

This is (for now at least) a solo project. I have been trading crypto for almost a decade, but my tech skills are pretty basic. However, I think that can end up being a good thing, because the problem with having a tech wizard make a DEX is they tend to assume everyone else is a wizard too, and so the UX ends up being way too complicated.

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What is an off-chain order book? I am not familiar with decentralized exchanges but recently I've been very interested in them because they promise freedom, ownership and anonymity. I've only tested Bisq and what I especially like about Bisq is that it automatically connects you to Tor and improves your anonymity. If you manage something similar in your product, that will be good.

An off-chain order book means the exchanges that take place on the DEX happen through the DEX's internal accounting system as opposed to the blockchain. So let's say you deposit DAI and use it to buy Monero, exchange the Monero for Bitcoin, and then withdraw the Bitcoin from your account. When the exchange takes place, the assets don't move on the blockchain; the DEX will adjust your account balance from DAI to Monero, and then from Monero to Bitcoin. When you deposit the DAI and withdraw the Bitcoin, that of course would take place on the blockchain.

So in that respect, it would be like a centralized exchange. But the owner of the DEX (me) won't have the private key to the wallets on the blockchain where customer funds are deposited. And neither would the node operators; all they would do is process the adjustments to the DEX's internal accounting system when assets are swapped, in exchange for a slice of the transaction fees.

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Decentralized exchanges really lack good UI/UX because it's the least of their priorities but if you focus on that, I believe you'll attract many people. I'm a UI/UX designer myself and I like both websites' UI but I prefer Binance's UI/UX design.

The main problem with the current DEXes is absolutely 100% what you just said: they lack a good UI/UX. Look at something like UnstoppableSwap. Fantastic technology, but using it to do anything other than buy Monero with Bitcoin requires more technical know-how than 99% of Monero users have.

Thanks for the feedback so far. Any more comments or suggestions that anyone has, I'm all ears.

TimFornash

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