Ethereum Exchange Protocol Race Heats Up With 'Swap' Launch

Members of the ethereum development community ConsenSys have unveiled a new peer-to-peer exchange protocol.

Dubbed "Swap", the protocol, debuted earlier this week in a new white paper, aims to facilitate the trustless exchange of assets across the ethereum network. In most cases, users would need to take their tokens to a centralized exchange or engage in an over-the-counter setting if they want to trade today.

One key aspect, the team wrote in a blog post today, is the absence of an order book with existing bids and asks for asset trades (another recently debuted exchange protocol, 0x, uses a decentralized order book to facilitate trades). Rather, the Swap protocol connects buyers and sellers directly, triggering the exchanges out of the public eye entirely.

While the code for Swap hasn't been made open-source yet, the team behind it says it's gearing up to release it – further, they want to bring other developers in on the action as well.

"We've designed the protocol to be straightforward and extensible and we'll open source our code soon to help kickstart app development," the team wrote. "If you're a developer, we look forward to working with you to build your next token-aware application."

Check out a demo version of Swap in the video below:

Peer-to-peer image via Shutterstock