I know many of you are looking forward to our decentralized exchange going live. Thank you for your patience as we work hard to make this a reality.

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’re one step closer to this goal. We’ve released the next version of our testnet Plasma DEX, marking another milestone towards instant, low-fee trades of virtually any token, all secured by the blockchain.

This release includes the following improvements:

- Instant buy and sell orders
- New user activity stream
- Enhanced user experience
- Enhanced mobile experience
- Faster loading time
- Fewer bugs

We’d love your feedback, so please give it a try and let us know what you think. We prepared a short tutorial video below as an introduction.

If you’re new to Altcoin.io, read on to find out why we chose a Plasma-like sidechain architecture for our DEX, and how we plan to increase the liquidity of all DEXs (and our own) with the Altcoin SDK.

Why Plasma?

Plasma is a design philosophy for off-chain applications originally introduced by Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Poon in their white paper, “Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts.”

We chose Plasma as the underlying architecture of our DEX for three reasons:

- Speed
- Security
- Scalability

Most decentralized exchanges are built on the Ethereum network, which can only process around 10 to 15 transactions per second. If you’ve used these before, you’ll notice trading is really slow and clunky, and this generally leads to low liquidity because of low adoption.

Plasma, on the other hand, helps scale transactional output, so you can trade at the speed of centralized exchanges while still retaining control of your tokens at all times.

Plasma enables us to create our own sidechain. You trade through the Altcoin.io sidechain and transactions are sent to the root Ethereum chain to ensure they’re trustless, secure, but still extremely fast. So no more waiting for orders to be filled or redoing failed transactions.

Altcoin SDK: Solving the liquidity problem

To really improve the market for the crypto community, we need to compete with centralized exchanges. That means building an instant, trustless trading engine, a great user experience, blockchain interoperability, and high liquidity.

Attracting liquidity is a challenge faced by all DEXs. To overcome this, we’ve released the Altcoin SDK, a toolkit that will help power hundreds or even thousands of DEXs and dApps, creating a shared pool of liquidity. And unlike 0x, for example, everyone can use the Altcoin SDK — you don’t need to be a developer to use our development kit.

The top decentralized exchange trades around $10 million a day, but the top centralized exchange trades over $1.5 to $2 billion. Fragmented liquidity is a problem we all face. It’s time we worked together to raise liquidity and daily trading volumes in secure, decentralized exchanges.

As we continue to work on the live version of our Plasma DEX, we believe the Altcoin SDK will help us launch with enough liquidity to really give you the best trading experience in the market. So stay tuned for more updates, and do get in touch if we can help get your decentralized exchange or application get off the ground.

Altcoin.io Team
https://www.altcoin.io/

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