[ZRX] 0X Project Speculation

he latest updates from the 0x ecosystem.
Hello 0x community! We haven’t reached out to you by email in a while, and we’re going to change that. Over the past 8 months, the team has been hard at work shipping code and building out our platform. These efforts have been paying off, and there are now a growing number of projects building on top of 0x.

In order to highlight these new teams, we are announcing Relayer Report, a bi-weekly newsletter focusing on the 0x ecosystem. We hope this newsletter keeps you up to date and encourages you to get involved. We’re featuring 10 projects already and are actively growing. If you’d like to be featured, email us here. If you want to share this newsletter with your friends, send them here.

For these newsletters, we’re going to use a pretty standard format:

Introduction

Special Feature

Ecosystem Updates

Extras: Reading & Fun Links

So jumping right into it…

The special feature for today is Tom, Product Manager at 0x, answering some questions about building on top of 0x.

What can you build on top of 0x?

0x, at its core, is an open source decentralized exchange protocol, so any use case that involves the trading of different assets can eventually be built using 0x. Currently, we’ve seen projects typically break into one of three different categories:

Protocols extending the core 0x protocol with new assets (dY/dX, Set)

Relayers that facilitate the trading of ERC-20 tokens using 0x for settlement (Radar Relay, ERC dEX, Paradex)

DApps that tap into our networked liquidity pool to offer trading to their users (EasyTrade).

We expect to the see the number of possible uses explode as the diversity of tokenized assets continues to increase.

What is a relayer? Why are they important? How do relayers make money?

Relayers are exchanges in 0x parlance. They host orderbooks of signed 0x orders on their servers and allow traders to find counter-parties. There is no mechanism baked into the 0x protocol for other parties to trade with, so relayers serve the crucial role of creating a centralized meeting place for an otherwise decentralized protocol.

Relayers can make money in a variety of ways. Naturally, they can charge fees -- paid in ZRX -- to the maker or taker of an order, similar to a centralized exchange. They can also match together overlapping orders and capture the spread, charge for access to special features or specific asset trading (such as security tokens), listing fees, or any number of other revenue schemes. As a protocol, 0x is extremely flexible and non-prescriptive.

What is a market maker? Why are they important? How do market makers make money?

All new markets, crypto or otherwise, generally suffer from a chicken-and-egg problem; no one wants to trade on exchanges that no one else is trading on, making it difficult to get initial traction. Most marketplaces solve this problem by ‘jumpstarting’ one side of the ecosystem, usually the ‘supply’ side, to entice the other side to come onboard. In markets like those for ERC-20 tokens, professional market makers act as that jumpstart by posting many buy and sell orders on either side of market price, allowing ‘takers’ to come to the market to buy or sell with the market maker as their counterparty.

Market Makers make money by either capturing the spread of the market -- it’s easy to be profitable when you’re always buying a $1 asset for $.99 and selling it for $1.01 -- or by receiving compensation from exchanges or token teams for providing that initial liquidity. If you’re interested in market making on 0x relayers, check out 0x Connect for easy API usage or reach out to tom@0xproject!

Where can I learn more about building on top of 0x?

Our wiki is full of great content about 0x more broadly, including several tutorials and starter projects. I’d also recommend checking out OpenRelay, an open source relayer, as a good example and potential base for your own project.

Feel free to swing by our Rocket.Chat to chat with members of the team and get technical guidance as you’re building. If you’re interested in core protocol develop, check out our forum as well.

Ecosystem Updates
0x (Blake):

New blog post by Will on tokenized securities and compliant trading

New blog post by Tom “18 Ideas for 0x Relayers in 2018”

Hiring across Engineering, Operations, and Marketing. Check out the opportunities here

Hydro Protocol/DDEX (Bowen):

Hydro Protocol API/SDK Github opensource on 4/27

Google Seattle Talk on 4/27, World Digital Asset Summit Panel about DEX with Bancor and Kyber on 5/1 - 5/3, Blockchain Week in NYC 5/11 - 5/18

DDEX on Trust, Cipher, Toshi

The 0cean (Monica):

Algorithmic Trading 101 course starts, awarding $1000 to 5 students / mentors

Sponsored Diversity Fellowship scholarship for Women+ in Blockchain initiative

Financial News feature; API beta release

ERCdEX (Lindsey):

Top markets by trade volume: WETH/DAI, ZRX/WETH, SPANK/WETH, FUN/WETH, OMG/WETH, ZRX/DAI

Onboarding partner dApps and Relayers to integrate with our global shared liquidity pool. Partners are compensated for their participation. Interested? Send us an email

Released Aqueduct - the premiere developer toolkit for algorithmic trading and liquidity sharing

OpenRelay (Greg):

Formally organized as Open Relay, LLC in mid-April, naming Austin Roberts as CEO

Added two new members to the founding team, Elizabeth Van Horn as COO and Greg Lang as CXO

Announcing Massive, a suite of command line tools for manipulating orders in bulk on OpenRelay

Radar Relay (Joe):

24/hr volume high was $15 Million. 150 tokens have been added to Radar Relay

We are looking to hire a DevOps Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, Office Manager/Executive Assistant, and an Operations Analyst. If you are interested in working at Radar Relay and none of those positions fit your talents reach out to jobs@radarrelay.com with more information on yourself! We are always looking for talented people

CoinCentral Article, CoinTelegraph Article. Our most recent update post on Medium

MobiDex (Abraham):

User testing ended and prepping for public-ish Alpha on Kovan Testnet

Paradex (Katrina):

Paradex will be presenting at EDCON in Toronto (May 3) and Token Summit in NYC (May 17)

Substantial improvements to our API to accommodate additional market makers. We currently support pairs like: WETH/DAI, MKR/DAI, ZRX and more. Whether you're a liquidity provider, trading firm, or an enthusiast with a side project, we'd be happy to get you a key or two. Email katrina.wollet@augmentpartners.com

We're hiring! If you're a Senior Software Developer, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a note at careers@paradex.io, and be sure to include a bit about yourself and your experience

Ethfinex (Chris):

Launched a video series featuring listed token projects and a new weekly newsletter. Check out the first two interviews on YouTube (Loopring and BnkToTheFuture) and sign up for our newsletter

Our dev and marketing teams will be in London from 5/2 - 5/6 to work on the next iteration of the product. Reach out if you would like to connect during that time (will@ethfinex.com or chris@ethfinex.com)

We recently announced an upgrade to the Nectar Token Smart Contract and completed the second distribution of trading rewards totaling 2,580.9 ETH (~ 1.3 million USD). Twitter: @ethfinex

Tokenjar.io (Eric):

Running on Mainnet; during this week, we’ve also upgraded our UI

Crypto Investment Community: our goal is to build a crypto investment community in which a Relayer is just one service we offer our users

Backing “fans0x”: we are dedicated to making more Chinese familiar with the 0x Project, and that’s why we are sponsoring fans0x on Twitter and WeChat

Shark Relay (Suchit):

Launched on Mainnet in April. Rewards of of $300 and $200 in ZRX to the top two users who provide UI feedback. We are looking for blockchain engineers and graphic designers, reach out at contact@sharkrelay.com

Major UI updates; we added a 0x news and updates section along with the option to change layout

Based on community feedback, we now offer the following tokens. If you are a Token Generator and would like to list your token on Shark Relay please fill out the application here

Reading
Governance in 0x Protocol (0x):

Excuse my homer bias, but a great post from Will recapping all governance issues in 0x. Of interest is his roadmap of how the protocol will eventually transition all community governance to token holders.

Pros and Cons of Different 0x Relayers (Reddit):

Quick comparison of Radar Relay, DDEX, and Paradex by a Reddit user. For more on choosing a Relayer model (Open Orderbook vs Matching), a good post from Paradex, as well as a link to the 0x wiki.

Congratulations to Bloqboard, the first live Dharma Debt Relayer (Dharma):

Very exciting stuff. I often hear the words “Cambrian explosion” when it comes to crypto and it does get old but no other way to describe how fast the ecosystem is growing.