<DevTalks: /> December 2018
Today is the first of our new development blog format, as we transition to monthly dev updates. The series is going to be called < DevTalks: /> (Developer Talks) and will allow us to go into more detail about the bigger picture and more exciting developments that we work on over the period of a month.
As we approach hard launch, we’ve been focusing a lot of our development efforts on marketing related development requests. This is often things that are not user facing, although are extremely important for our long-term viability. We’ve recently restructured the entire backend/frontend architecture of the site to make it more friendly to search engines, which have general problems crawling Javascript applications, and over the next few weeks we will revisit the URL structure of the website. Although changes such as these often appear trivial, they are actually some of the biggest drivers of organic traffic to websites over a longer time period.
But on to the fun stuff!
On the cryptocurrency front we now have a wealth of new integrations:
Havven have recently rebranded their nUSD and HVX tokens into sUSD and SNX, as part of their overall rebrand into Synthetix as a company. As our part of this process, we have performed the token swap automatically for all users on the LocalCoinSwap platform.
Although a recent slight uptrend has just occurred, Cryptocurrency markets have been in turmoil for the last few weeks, with heavy losses on all top coins and tokens. The bear market has been in full swing for some time, almost the entirety of 2018, with the latest round of heavy losses triggered by the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV hashwar. The fallout has resulted in both variants of BCH losing significant market share, and damage overall to the stability of cryptocurrency.
During this period the markets have seen a rise in demand for stable-coins pegged to the US dollar, which allow traders to avoid the large volatility of traditional blockchain assets. While Tether is the dominant player in the stable-coin market it has unfortunately been the subject of many conspiracies and accusations of improper behaviour.
To avoid hedging the fortunes of LocalCoinSwap traders on a single stable-coin, we have instead decided to implement every major stable-coin from CoinMarketCap on to the platform. As of today, not only is Tether available for trading, but also Dai, Paxos, USDC, Gemini Coin and True USD - along with our existing integration of sUSD
We hope the integration of all major stable-coins will now gives user the ability to freely trade while avoiding the extreme volatility of current markets.
On the user-facing frontend side we also have a huge number of new upgrades:
Some cosmetic changes to improve user experience on the homepage include alphabetical options in boxes and improved column sorting. Users can now click the headers of columns to more easily sort by price, cryptocurrency, and payment method. The sorting by price is also now calculated with respect to the relative values of the fiat currencies.
We’ve implemented an entirely new homepage, explaining the key selling points and basic overview of LocalCoinSwap with a Marketing focus. Logged in users will still see the regular exchange homepage. This is only the first iteration and we will be working further on this into 2019 as a high priority.
Traders can also now edit trades rather than having to delete them to change key metrics such as price or conditions. This will greatly simplify the trading experience.
Another important new feature is the ability to share trades on social media, including Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Users can now share trades simply by visiting the page for their advertisement.
As we approach Christmas, development will continue at our regular pace, with our next round of updates including SMS notifications for new trades, and updated profile pages.
We also have several exciting features expected for hard launch, which at the moment is planned for the day of the first dividend distribution. We will launch a site volume dashboard for LCS token holders which will allow them to calculate expected dividends, and a walkthrough process for claiming dividends.
I hope everyone is as excited as we are for what is to come in 2019. Thank you!
Happy Trading!
Nathan Worsley
CTO & Co-Founder, LocalCoinSwap
If you would like to read through all of our DevTalks, you can find them here: