BTW, does anyone know why they added Ripio? ... they said there were focused on adding top 50ish coins, but lately we've gotten Ripio, Vertcoin, and Digibyte, and bunch of low ranked ERC20 tokens ... not sure why those were picked when coins like Monero, Nem, Neo have been on the waiting list forever, but get passed over for weird coins that are not even on the roadmap.
Hi HashFace.
Thank you for this question.
OmegaStarScream correctly gave the gist of the situation, allow me to elaborate a little.
There are two types of assets supported by Exodus, those that can be exchanged using the built-in exchange feature and those that cannot. The first ones can be either coins with their own blockchain or ERC-20 tokens, while the second ones are only ERC-20 tokens.
Adding ERC-20 tokens (we call them Ethereum assets) is usually easier than adding an asset with its own blockchain and we have tried to support most of the Ethereum assets
roughly in the top 100 spots based on market cap. If an Ethereum asset is supported by ShapeShift then it's added on the first category; if not, then it's added on the second one. Ripio is an asset that is supported by ShapeShift so we added it. I know it's not as popular as some other assets that we don't yet support, but since it is easy to add why not offer it to our customers.
And yes, you're right, most of them are added without ever being on the roadmap. We want to offer the ability to our customers to be able to safely store and transact as many Ethereum assets as possible, especially now that the landscape in the ecosystem is somehow murky on that front. For that reason we are also working in order to offer you the ability to add
any Ethereum asset you want.
That, of course, doesn't mean that we have given up on supporting the more popular assets. On the contrary! Supporting Monero is one of our top priorities at the moment. So, is NEO and NEM and others. But, like I said, sometimes it's hard to add these assets and several difficulties present themselves along the way. For example, Ripple has been in beta for a long time because there isn't a reliable solution to the insight servers. Monero is built in a way that requires the whole blockchain to be downloaded, which is not how Exodus works. Unless these issues are resolved we cannot proceed to add these assets.
Finally, we do mention that in order for an asset to be considered it needs to be in or around the top 50 spots, but this is more of a guideline than a strict prerequisite. Perhaps we need to work on our wording there and make that more clear. Because there are other factors to consider. For example, when we added Vertcoin you can't imagine the number of enthusiastic tweets we received about it! There is value in some cases that goes beyond the strict market cap.
We want as much to add to Exodus all these assets that you mentioned, and more. And we will. But they need to be added in a way that they, and the wallet in whole, work reliably and seamlessly.
I hope I was able to clarify this for you.
All the best,
Michalis