Not at a niche but everywhere

Among a host of new-breed exchanges that support the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem, Atani is set to be a game-changer by providing the most efficient environment that lets you trade across several exchanges at one place. With this deep dive into Atani DEX, we’ll look at its background, how we reached here, why it is so significant, and the future of Atani with its community. But first, what the heck is DeFi?The below sections briefly dwell on the underlying concepts that make up this essay. If you’re already familiar with DeFi, DEXs, and aggregators, feel free to skip these parts.

The centralized finance system consists of the classical banking system. After the entry of blockchain (and cryptocurrencies) in our cyber-world, a host of new technologies have enabled an open and distributed ecosystem of finance that gets rid of the banks (no more middle parties = permissionless). This ecosystem is the Decentralized Finance or DeFi in short. Since its inception, it has grown tremendously in value. (from $1B to ~$80B) This DeFi ecosystem and its tokenomics(demand and supply of cryptocurrencies) are enabled by a set of open-source protocols, smart contracts (that guarantee reliability), and tokens. Thus it lets people exchange, lend, borrow and save (all the features of classic money) in a trustless but secure manner. And why do these tokens have any value in the first place? Answer: Stable coins. These are crypto-assets pegged to a currency of the banking system, say, US dollar, after locking in collateral (custody) and thus bring value to the tokens.

Let’s expand on the finance system and its monetary features a bit more. So we’ve established that these stablecoins together with smart contracts get monetary value on a blockchain. Various kinds of blockchains, like Ethereum and Solana, incentivize communities to build more decentralized apps(Dapps) and solutions thus bringing more value on-chain. As tokens are the currencies of this value, their exchange constitutes DeFi. And how easily one asset can be exchanged with another, with the least effect on its price, is determined by the market’s liquidity. This exchange takes place in two manners: Central Exchanges (CEX) and Decentralized Exchanges (DEX).

Our interest of the hour lies in DEXs. These exchanges are for direct peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions securely and without the need for an intermediary. They allow decentralized and permissionless exchange without giving up custody. They are better than CEX on several factors (like anonymity).

In absence of a central market maker (like classic stock exchanges that mediate between sellers’ selling prices and buyers’ bids), DEXs rely on liquidity pools and Automatic Market Makers (AMM) based on smart contracts that let users exchange token pairs in a permissionless and anonymous manner. But there are a few downsides. DEXs suffer from low liquidity as token pairs in their liquidity pools are affected by low trading volume as users are fragmented across different DEXs. This is known to be a barrier to DeFi adoption. Furthermore, achieving consensus and executing trade orders can take more time than on a centralized off-chain transaction platform as order books may have asymmetrical bids and sell. Thus we reach DEX aggregators.

The issues with fragmentation between DEXs cause an increase in switching costs, slow down the rate of adoption of crypto, and frustrate a lot of potential users who just do not care enough to spend the amount of time and effort required to overcome those frictions. DEXs are composed of pools of token pairs locked in a smart contract that form liquidity pools. By syncing into multiple DEXes, a DEX aggregator pulls data from multiple DEX order books, scanning for the best cryptocurrency prices. In a nutshell, easier DEX trading experience. Thus DEX aggregators are improving not just cross-blockchain interoperability but also liquidity by reducing fragmentation of users and bringing a holistic experience in one place.

Early versions of crypto DEXs applied an order book format much like what you’d find on a centralized exchange (CEX), lining up buy and sell orders from users, matching traders, and settling the trades. This created a liquidity issue — without enough people or enough assets filling up the order books, DEXs were unable to match the depths of liquidity on CEXs, leading to low adoption rates. While upcoming DEXs use liquidity pools and Automatic Market Making algorithms, they still lack several features provided by CEXs.

Enter Atani DEX. One-of-a-kind DEX aggregator that provides all cool features of a DEX, plus more services found in CEXs such as advanced orders. It also provides advanced charting features, trading orders, stop loss, take profit, and one cancels other (OCO) order types that are useful for the experienced traders on the built-in DEX. It also has a user-friendly interface in contrast to the majority of decentralized exchanges.

To understand the significance of these features, it is imperative to know how Atani is doing this? This DEX aggregation platform is built on top of the Solana and Serum blockchains which both implement the Proof of History protocol and Seesaw mechanism. This lets Atani DEX continuously develop on top of an already increasing ecosystem and provide features of an advanced exchange. Let’s get into details.

Do you know what’s something that the crypto community loves? A highly scalable and performant blockchain. Yes, we’re talking about Solana. Mass adoption is the key here. And so is the sentiment of the community at Atani Dex. For Atani, Solana is the perfect “Petri dish” to nurture and scale the next generation of decentralized finance applications that will support mass adoption.

Now, to get more and more value on-chain is the de-facto goal of DeFi. And to support this on-boarding a set of building blocks are required that are stable, efficient, and highly performant. Enter project Serum. FYI Sino Global invested in the project and Serum is best described in their own words:

“Enabled by Solana and [it] can serve as a key primitive for multiple $1T+ industries. Serum is an experiment to bring the full centralized exchange experience, with full limit order books and a matching engine, fast settlement and trading, and low transaction costs, to a decentralized world — at scale.”

In a nutshell, serum enables a fast DEX; it has cross-chain support, stablecoins, wrapped coins, order books, and the ability to create custom and novel financial products; [You guessed it: Atani DEX] and while having all of those, it’s fully decentralized. And it is permissionless– no one holds a special power. It is up to the crypto community, to use it as we will. Serum is pure DeFi. And unlike current DeFi, it’s fast and cheap. Serum enables a trading experience that can compete for head to head with that of centralized exchanges.

Some of its notable advantages for being built on solana and serum are:

• Scalability: 65k transactions per second.

• Speed: 400ms block times.

• Low cost: $0.00001 transaction cost.

• Composability: High performance without Layer-2 solutions or sharding.

• Decentralization and security.

• Ecosystem: Top tier partners.

We saw how Atani Dex is based on solana and serum thus strengthening its DEX position. Now let’s look at its features in detail. In a nutshell, Atani is a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator that allows you to trade on multiple DEXs from a single user interface. It currently supports trading on all DEXes supported by Serum and also ones listed below, or will soon: Kovan OasisDEX Alpha DeltaDEX.

At Atani, you can trade any number of tokens on any number of exchanges with no middleman and no counterparty risk. Each trading pair between exchanges will be supported by a completely trustless atomic cross-chain swap on the Serum blockchain, with settlement occurring on the Solana blockchain. All of your trading activity can be done from a single user interface- everything is automatically synced across the DEXes.

You can create trade orders, set stop loss, take profit, and one-cancels-all (OCO) orders, and receive price alerts for any trading pair. The first DEX to give you stop and take profit orders is Solana. Atani will also have customizable charts and powerful technical analysis tools that you can perform with TradingView. One can trade their favorite coins on multiple DEXes from a single user interface. You can also create a custom watch list to stay on top of the game. Let’s get a walkthrough experience of dex.atani.com

Atani DEX brings not just assurance of execution with trades but also assurance of price with its advanced orders such as stop loss, take profit and OCO. So if volatility hit during the time of swapping, then you can do a swap execution at a price close to what you expect. No more missed opportunities. If you’ve traded token pairs before, then you might have found yourself approving a swap and as it settles, a sudden slippage spike and we buy tokens at a price far higher than they were just seconds ago. With Limit Orders, you get orders filled only at the price range you want. No unplanned losses, less price impact. And with Stop Losses, no moreworrying about price tanking to zero overnight. Cherry on the cake, you can also place order in a pair of conditional orders stipulating that if one order executes, then the other order is automatically canceled, i.e., OCOs. Atani brings all of these features in a friendlier environment for institutional trading.

The full limit and advanced orderbooks with an interface familiar to that of centralized exchanges that Atani DEX offers is powered, in real time, by Project Serum’s orderbooks. That takes the DEXs availaible to trade swaps to an unmatched number with any other platform in the ecosystem.

To get started with Atani DEX simply connect your wallet and you’re good to go. Currently, it offers all the wallets supported by Solana blockchain and more to be added down the roadmap. With any of these wallets, you can start trading and settle funds both manually and automatically. This is a result of accurate portfolio tracking that lets you trade with ease of mind.

Monitoring charts at Atani DEX is made easy with the most popular charting platform that the world loves: TradingView. You can be sure of where you leap if you have the best look. Thus strengthining your advanced technical analysis of on-chain data. Moreover, Atani also provides creating alerts so you can be sure that you won’t miss a trade while you prioritize other things, adding more hours to live your life without worry.

If a DEX experience can compete with a CEX experience, DEX volume will keep on growing. And growing volumes will lead to decentralized exchanges proliferating, evolving, and improving, just as what happened with centralized ones. The challenge ahead may be mass adoption. But Atani firmly believes in this and they have laid down a set of roadmaps to bring the best and first DEX aggregator experience to users. For instance, one of the downsides that DeFi is criticed upon is that DeFi traders can’t automate their trading. Atani’s DEX roadmap even includes providing API to automate operations on the DEX. Thus, ongoing mass adoption and reducing the friction of fragmentation will be marked by improving liquidity and high values in on-chain Advanced Orders. They plan to also develop features for trading across DEXs in multiple chains. This is inversely proportional to switching costs and hence will drive volume growth to Solana and Serum directly.

Atani already has a flagship product, the Atani CEX Aggregator (available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS). It enables non-custodial and real-time trade execution, portfolio tracking, advanced technical analysis, and tax reporting for 9,000+ trading instruments across 20+ of the largest global centralized crypto exchanges. And from this practical expertise of their community, they released the Atani DEX beta. Since its launch, its community has increased several folds. It is fairly active in providing support and responding to feature requests. Currently, the community is relentlessly working on the next set of features for the DEX platform that will be the first of its kind.

The result is a DEX aggregator that could potentially disrupt the DeFi ecosystem. Such a system could end the need for costly, time-consuming reconciliation across separate, centralized ledgers run by multiple entities. It could also enable new forms of economic activity that were previously impossible in the absence of reliable, intermediating record-keepers. In conclusion, Atani DEX improves upon the following:

Atani Dex with its constantly improving ecosystem will drive more tokens and more exchanges mean more choices and more financial freedom.

Co-authored by Akash Bhadauria