Project update: May 2020

It has been a little while since our last overview of the goings-on here at LocalCoinSwap so we thought it would be about time we touched base with our awesome community of traders, users, and token holders. There has been a lot going on behind the scenes, both on and off the codebase so here is a shortlist of what we have been recently working on.

Publicly verifiable smart contracts

To increase transparency on the platform and ensure that users are confident that their funds are safe, we are upgrading our Ethereum and Ethereum-based token smart contracts to ones with verified source code on Etherscan.

You can now view the source code for our Ethereum smart contract here, and verify each trade transaction yourself if you are unsure of our trustworthiness:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xda8b21b94668300ddbc0ecbaf57530d396287848#code

It is now provable from verified source code, that LocalCoinSwap is unable to steal your Ethereum, even if we wanted to (or were hacked).

The USDT (Tether) smart contract can be found here:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x9975e90fc7d9dc861a78b171428495e388468885#code

In the upcoming weeks, we will do the same with the rest of our trading smart contracts, and show the address of the smart contract being used in each trade.

Exportable trade history

This is a feature that has been requested by some of our top traders. Users can now navigate to the past trades section of their dashboard and export all their complete trade history to CSV format. This way it can be easily added to a spreadsheet or accounting software to track your own trading activity on LocalCoinSwap. Adding to a spreadsheet also allows easy filtering of trades by the different variables.

New additions of exchange rates

As you may know, although the top centralized exchanges often have similar prices for top pairings (BTC/USD etc.), regional centralized exchanges often have a little price variation for a variety of reasons. This can be due to local taxes, regional regulations, additional costs in fund transfers, variance in local currency rates against USD, and a variety of other reasons. Some of our traders in Australia have requested the addition of a local exchange to peg their offers prices to. So we have now added Independent Reserve to both the margin and advanced pricing sections of the offer creation process.

Ability to select exchanges for margin pricing

Until recently, when using the basic margin pricing functionality in the offer creation process, the price used was solely the coinmarketcap exchange rate. Users wanting to use alternative price references would have to use the more complex advanced pricing function. Now users wanting to use the basic margin price are able to select a variety of top exchanges to fetch prices from using a simple dropdown.

As you may know, as part of the LocalCoinSwap’s transition to becoming a completely non-custodial platform, we recently began the migration process to transfer all users to client-side encrypted accounts. This has several benefits. Firstly it ensures increased security of your account as it cannot be accessed through any hacking of a centralized system. Your password is needed to decrypt your account. This also means that it is not possible for anyone to seize or steal any funds stored in your non-custodial wallets without account access (i.e. your password). Even if someone somehow gains access to your email account, it is not possible to reset your LCS password through any “forgot password” functionality.

It is important that users can prove that their accounts are client-side encrypted and do not need to trust the LocalCoinSwap platform. As there are a few users that have not signed in a long while, and therefore have not yet migrated their accounts, we have reworked the sign-in process to treat these user types differently. Now when you sign in with a client-side encrypted account, you can verify that your password is securely used to decrypt your account.

Filter offers by last seen time

When searching through the various trade offers on the platform, it can be frustrating to find one that matches your requirements (in terms of payment method, reputation, etc.) only to initiate a trade with the user and have them not respond.

Users can now filter results down to only show trade offers where the vendor has been online in the last 30 min, 24, hours, 1-2 weeks, or month. This is done using the “Last Seen” dropdown in the “Advanced search”

Improvement of the MetaMask trade flow

There has been an increase in the number of users deciding to trade Ethereum or ETH-based tokens directly out of their MetaMask wallets rather than utilizing the platform web wallets. This can be a real time-saver and also reduce the associated blockchain transaction (gas) costs involved with depositing to the site and then funding escrow.

Until recently, there was no functionality to check if a user had adequate MetaMask wallet balance before they attempted to fund the escrow (this functionality already existed for trading out of platform web wallets). This was frustrating as it could result in a slower trade if a MetaMask wallet top-up was required first. Now a user is prompted that they do not have adequate balance in their MetaMask wallet before they attempt to initiate the escrow transaction!

Improved back-end audit process

As we are seeing a growth in platform users and trade volume, the number of bad actors attempting to infiltrate the platform undoubtedly increases in proportion. We have recently focused additional efforts on creating systems to detect and block these users quicker than we could in the past.

Of course, there will always be some nefarious actors that slip through the net, but users can easily keep themselves safe by following the correct trade-flow and engaging in safe trading practices.

New landing page

Although this is not yet live, we have been developing a new landing page. Along with the increased aesthetics, this page will serve to introduce users to LocalCoinSwap and provide them with information on the platform and P2P trading. This will ensure a smooth introduction to those new to LocalCoinSwap.

Keep an eye out for this to be pushed live soon!

Page load speed increased

Slow page loading can be extremely frustrating, especially for those in areas with slow internet or on mobile devices that have a tendency to be slow as well. In addition, Google’s algorithms reduce the rankings in search engine results for sites that do not load quickly in comparison to competitors.

We have put some additional work into this area and now have the quickest P2P platform on the market. We have achieved this through a variety of updates including using the platform’s servers to take as much of the strain of users devices as possible.

Increased number and focus of articles

LocalCoinSwap followers may have noticed that we have more recently been releasing articles on the blog with a slightly different focus. Although many of the people reading this may already have an intricate understanding of Bitcoin and P2P trading, this is not a reality for everyone. And especially for new users entering the ecosystem. Therefore we have now created a range of educational articles helping to explain BTC, P2P trading, and other basic crypto topics to new users to help guide their way into the crypto-sphere. These can all be found on our blog so be sure to share them with any friends that are learning about crypto.

If you have any related topics that would be beneficial to yourself, or other users, that you would like covered in an article, please feel free to reach out and we may be able to put something together!

UI/UX tweaks

At LocalCoinSwap we are constantly improving the User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) to ensure a smooth P2P trading process. Many of these tweaks have been small and some larger, but they all make a difference in the overall platform experience. Thanks to all the users that have provided valuable feedback and suggestions through our support portal. If you have any suggestions or feature requests, please feel free to reach out and we will see if we can add them to the development backlog!

Non-custodial BTC trading is working - pending rollout is imminent

As we have announced in the past, we are moving the platform to become completely non-custodial. While ETH and ERC20 tokens are already handled in this manner, BTC non-custodial wallets and trading are not yet live. As BTC is the most popular cryptocurrency traded on LocalcoinSwap, we have not been in a huge rush to make big changes to this process as we want to ensure the new procedures are as smooth as possible. Lots of work has been going on behind the scenes with this and the system is working well end-to-end. We are now working on the final UX/UI and the best way to launch without interruption to current users.

Increased user count

Weekly signup rates are at an all-time high at LocalCoinSwap. With the world on lockdown, and other P2P platforms disenfranchising their users en-masse through account lockings, and slow customer support times, people are always looking for better options. We have seen several top traders in various regions move part or all their trading activities to LocalCoinSwap in response to this, and we are improving the platforms and processes to pave the way for more to do the same.

Since the start of the ongoing pandemic, the weekly signup rate has increased by over 100%.

Increased efforts in Spanish-language markets

Although not obvious to those in our English speaking communities, we have been increasing our presence, content, and reach in Spanish speaking markets. We have several team members located in Latin America and are seeing growth here in followers and user base.

Latin America is one of the fastest-growing hubs in cryptocurrency for a variety of economical and political regions. As a P2P exchange, LocalCoinSwap is the ideal platform to assist users in entering and exiting crypto markets thanks to the payment method agnostic trading we can facilitate.

And more…

We have another exciting development/announcement/collaboration in the works that we will be able to announce soon. Keep an eye out on our socials for upcoming announcements!

Thank you to everyone in the amazing LocalCoinSwap community. We hope to see you trading on the platform soon. As usual, join us on Telegram to chat with staff and community members, or reach out to us through the support portal at any time.

Happy trading!