Trading on Kyber Network
By: Gokul N K
Tags: Blockchain, Kyber Network, Kyber, Decentralized Exchange, Dex

Distributed exchanges or DEX as they are popularly called will go mainstream in 2018. This year it would make sense to invest in cryptocurrency exchange coins and especially DEX projects as they will find mainstream adoption. If you want to know the details checkout my previous post on investing in cryptocurrency exchanges.

Kyber Network was one of the most hyped ICOs last year. I think rightly so. It was one of the interesting projects I was following up. They had promised the mainnet release and Q1 2018 and looks like they are sticking to their road plan. They recently launched their Pilot on Mainnet. The early is access is provided to KGT holders. As you can see there are only 39485 KGT tokens and these were distributed to all the participants in the ICO.

I had also participated in the ICO and was awarded a KGT. Since this was a project I was excited about I thought of giving the platform a try. I tried to exchange Ether of Gifto tokens and here are the steps with screenshots.

Import Address

Since this is a decentralised exchange you don’t need to sign up or login. No more providing your personal details to centralised exchanges which keep getting hacked every other day. You can trade or transfer cryptos without signing up or logging in. Isn’t that cool?

All you need to do is import the address using which you need to transfer or make an exchange. As you can see they support five popular ways for importing your addresses. I used https://metamask.io/

Supported cryptocurrencies

Currently 10 tokens are supported on the portal.

Aelf (AELF)

Basic Attention Token (BAT)

Decentraland (MANA)

EOS (EOS)

Gifto (GTO)

Kyber Network (KNC)

OmiseGo (OMG)

Power Ledger (POWR)

Request Network (REQ)

Status Network (SNT)

In the beta phase looks like only “Ether to Token” and “Token to Ether” exchanges are supported. I am looking forward to Token to Token conversion very soon. That would be the real game changer.

Checking the price

Since we are used to seeing the prices of token with respect to Bitcoin or Ether I chose the same order so that the interface looks similar.

Enter value 1 if you want to cross check the prices. I used Binance to compare the latest prices. Once you are done checking click on the arrows icon in between to switch the source and destination tokens.

Click on Advance options and you will have options to enter the minimum rate you are expecting(You need atleast 1987.32xxxx Gifto tokens for every ether you send) and Gas price.

Once you confirm to the popup, metamask asks for a confirmation.

As soon as you confirm. Your transaction is broadcasted.

Remember that your exchange is a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain. If you have participated in an ICO you can find the similarities here. You are transferring your tokens to Kyber Network provided address. Kyber network does the internal negotiations and provides you with the best possible deal. If the best possible deal is above the limit you set the exchange happens.

If the exchange doesn’t happen for some reasons you might loose out your transaction fees. If anybody has faced this please let me know in the comments.

In our case the transaction was successful and I received the tokens as you can see in the image above : TADA. You can checkout the smart contract here https://etherscan.io/tx/0x343fdc138f7e83399d7428e61ffe6decde4c1a74257ec23489a4ea0e5ad69876

As you can see the Actual Tx Cost/Fee was 0.002029644 Ether ($1.70). I had chosen the “Fast” option and hence the rates were on a higher side. If I had selected slow it would have been in the range 0.00033 ETH or $0.28.

What is interesting is this amount wouldn’t change with the number/value of transaction I am doing. It will only be dependent on the cost of running the smart contract. So in general for very small amounts it might be better to do the exchange on centralised exchanges. In all other cases Kyber Network can be a very good alternative.

My thoughts after using Kyber Network

It is like version 2 of https://blocktrades.us/ The UI/UX is neat and simple. The help texts are to the point. The time for transaction were very less. Since Kyber Network is taking care of the liquidity the limiting factor here will be the speed of Ethereum network itself. As long as krypokitties don’t screw us over we should be good. I will bet on Kyber Network until any other legitimate contender comes along. Bitshares has some serious competition in terms of DEX part. Waiting for Token to Token exchange going live. I hope the platform lives up to the expectations and will not have liquidity/scaling issues.

If you are planning on buying KNC tokens you can use this referral link https://www.binance.com/trade.html?symbol=KNC_ETH&ref=10117962

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Disclaimer : The above article is not investment advice. I am just sharing my thoughts.