my name is Zack Coburn and I am here
representing ether Delta I want to start
by giving a little background about Who
I am I started my career as a
professional options market maker in
Chicago for a firm called Optive ER and
I quit that job in the middle of 2015 to
pursue a career in entrepreneurship
around the beginning of 2016 I started
looking at the theory 'im full-time and
that's what I've been doing ever since I
am also a co-founder of first blood
which is a decentralized platform that
lets eSports players challenge each
other and win rewards using the
blockchain for settlement and then of
course ether Delta which I'm here to
talk about today
ether Delta really came from my
realization that with the ERC 20 token
standard it was possible to let anyone
trade tokens through a smart contracts
and there really needed to be an
interface to let people do that as
easily as possible
so ether Delta launched in July of 2016
and that was shortly after the Dow
fiasco and it was also months before the
ICO craze even really started when it
first launched there were really only a
couple of tokens you could trade I think
it was maker and digits and so it's
really come a long way since then it is
a decentralized trading platform and
what that means is that you don't have
to trust a central party to hold your
funds because they are held in a smart
contract and it is as of today the most
used app on aetherium by a variety of
measures that I'll get into later in the
presentation here's a screenshot of what
easier Delta looks like today you can
see there is basically a list of tokens
you can trade
there is an order book depending on
which token you're looking at there's
some basic charting function
and there's this list of trades so a
question that's often asked is what
exactly about ether Delta is
decentralized and what it really is is
that when you go to deposit you are
sending funds to a smart contract and
they are held in a smart contract in
such a way that you and only you can
withdraw them so you can think of it
almost as a multi-sig but it's really a
single sig that only you can use with
some additional trading functionality
built into that smart contract so that
additional trading functionality is what
enables trade settlement anytime that
you do a trade on ether delt that you're
sending a transaction to the smart
contract and the smart contract decides
is this trade valid and if it is it will
actually move funds from you to your
counterparty and vice versa so the the
functions that I kind of once there
already you can deposit you can withdraw
and that includes ether or ERC 20 tokens
those are two separate functions meaning
that when you deposit of course that's
different than it would draw but also if
you deposit ether that's different than
depositing a token what the user
interface handles all of this for you
then of course there's a trade function
which is the core piece of functionality
and order cancellation is also something
that goes through the smart contract so
if you notice there's something missing
here which is where is the order book
and the order book is actually an off
chain construct and so whenever you go
to do a trade on ether Delta you are
taking the volume that you want to trade
the price you want to trade and also an
expert block number you package all that
stuff together hash it and sign it and
so what happens is when somebody else
sees your order in the order book and
they want to trade with it they will
submit that order to the smart contract
the smart contract will check does the
signature actually match the order that
was created and also does the
counterparty and do you have the funds
available to actually complete this
trade if all those things are true and
the order hasn't expired yet then the
smart contract will do the trade
the the expiration is of course a block
number so you can if you'd like to have
your order last forever you can choose a
block number hundreds of years into the
future or you can do a block number that
expires tomorrow if you want the
equivalent of like a good four day order
this off chain order book technology was
pioneered by ether ops which was sort of
a precursor to ether Delta that I worked
on in the beginning of 2016 where it was
basically a platform where you could
trade options based on the ether to US
dollar price and it had a similar option
order book technology and the real point
here is that as a former trader I really
believe that you should encourage people
to add the quiddity
and make it as cheap as possible and so
when you when you add a order to ether
Delta it is literally as cheap as it can
possibly be there's no gas fee because
you're not sending a real transaction to
ethereum and there's also no trading fee
so it costs you nothing to basically
play the role of a market maker on ether
Delta every other operation that you do
does involve a gas fee so if you are
depositing withdrawing doing the trade
cancelling in order all those things
involve a gas fee and then finally there
is a fee for taking the quiddity so if
you if you see another order in the
order book that you like and you want to
trade it you'll be the person paying the
fee for that and that's really ether
Delta's business model here are some
statistics of how it's done to date
there are a total of 90,000 addresses
that have traded with a smart contract
of course some of those might be some
people might have more than one address
but it's a pretty good measure there are
30,000 daily users using the site and it
has processed a total of 3.4 million
transactions in the smart contract this
is a view from the site if gas station
info and it basically lists all of the
smart contracts and ranks them by how
much gas is being spent on transactions
going through that particular smart
contract so ether Delta's typically its
most commonly in the first place and the
percentage of gas that's going through
our Delta tends to vary between 10 and
30% depending on the day this next chart
is a list of all the smart contracts
this is from ether scan and it's sorted
by number of transactions that have gone
through the smart contract since the
beginning of time and so ether Delta is
in first place with 3.4 million
transactions you can see a number of
other names from Polonia exhbit rex in
the top four and five and then the first
real DAP up there also is ENS with just
over a million transactions to date this
graph shows the total transaction volume
since the beginning of May and it's in
ether so when the snapshot was taken at
the end of October there was a total of
about 1.8 million ether that's been
traded through the ether Delta smart
contract and this is really a testament
to not only ether Delta's success but
really the explosion of the token
economy in ethereum you can really see
June July like that's when I would say
the ICO craze really started I did a
quick survey recently of ether Delta
users to get a sense for what do people
think I collected some written feedback
but also some numbers that I can
actually show you today the first
question is what is your overall opinion
of ether Delta and the plurality of
people just over 20 percent actually
love it
I was a little bit surprised to see that
it's so weighted to the right hand side
I think a general impression of ether
Delta is that you hate it until you love
it meaning you come you're very confused
you've never used anything like this
before yeah you guys know and then five
minutes later after a conversation in
the support channel you figured
everything out and you love it it's the
best thing you've ever used before I
asked how frequently do you use ether
Delta the majority of people use it
either daily or hourly why do you use
ether Delta so this is interesting the
top choice was to
to choose from and so one of the things
about user Delta is that because it's
happening in the smart contract that
supports the ERC 20 token standard you
can trade any token you would like
there's no restriction some tokens end
up being officially listed on the site
meaning that the token has approached me
and they want to actually appear on the
list of tokens in the volume box whereas
there are also tokens a trade just as
custom tokens meaning someone imports
the token address and just starts
trading it and then the second-place
answer it's decentralized just under 30
percent another thing is that I
sometimes talk to people users of the
site and ask do you know what's
different about easier Delta and their
answer is often not oh it's
decentralized there are a lot of people
using it that don't really realize what
are the benefits they're here because
there are so many tokens they're
interested in one particular year I see
20 token that maybe they weren't able to
participate in the crowd sale or they
want to to sell something and that's why
they end up on the site so I'll go
through a handful of lessons learned I
think probably any decentralized
application can have some takeaways from
these the first one maybe you remember
this picture on Twitter this was a case
where the URL for each or Delta was
changing from a github pages URL which
was ether Delta github that I owe to the
dot-com ether Delta com and the only way
I could initially think to verify that
the new domain name was actually
associated with ether Delta was to take
this crazy picture late one night there
was also a video the next day another
thing about ether Delta that I think is
really important is there's this Gitter
channel in the beginning there would be
you know one or two users per day coming
through this channel to figure out how
do I use ether Delta now there are
10,000 people signed up and it's really
just a constant stream of questions and
answers and I think this is really
important there's actually a team behind
this now so if you go on the the chat
room you'll see Ichiro Delta rep one rub
two rub three rub for they're answering
questions
most hours of the day and I think this
is really important especially when like
your DAP comes online and people
actually have to understand things about
how aetherium works to use your DAP sure
you can hide a lot of it in the user
experience but sometimes the users is
just going to have to understand how
does gas work in order to really figure
out what's going on this is a graph with
daily volume on the y-axis and funds
raised on the x-axis and I've
highlighted ether Delta here in the
upper left quadrant what I'm really
trying to say here is that you see a lot
of these decentralized trading platform
projects raising funds right now and
they have been barely launched they
don't get any of the volume ether Delta
as a prime example of your business
model does not need to involve raising
capital
as a first step in order to succeed so
more on that like when I was starting
either Delta in July of 2016
really starting to build it in late
April I think I thought good and hard to
myself how can I do this without first
raising a boatload of cash and secondly
how can I possibly monetize this without
creating a token and I realized that all
I really have to do is charge a fee and
that's what ether Delta has been doing
for over a year now it is a respectable
business model that I wish more people
would do so here here it is some some
statements that I I would make to two
new projects entering the space if your
first step is to raise millions of
dollars you aren't taking a real risk
taking a real risk will make you work
harder I mean I was a year ahead of the
curve with this project but I was also
working hard thinking there are probably
other people who have had this exact
same idea doing the exact same thing I
could go in okay I didn't know it was
the thing that I I could have done some
kind of an ICO or I could just work hard
and build the products and finally
having a pile of cash takes away your
urgency I really think there there are
enough data points now that this is a
very true statement and ether Delta is a
prime example of of what not having a
pile of cash can allow you to actually
achieve so there are a handful of things
that are new about ether Delta that I
want to bring up one you may have
noticed that prior to the Byzantium hard
fork there were a lot of transactions
backlog in the etherium Network I would
sometimes look and see thousands six
thousand eight thousand transactions
pending in the etherium Network and
there would be half of them were ether
Delta transactions the Byzantium heart
fork has helped a lot you no longer have
to wait upwards of a day to get your
trade done which is just completely
unusable and you you won't really as
frequently find out that after you've
submitted a trade it turns out someone
else already did the same trade and your
transaction failed wasting gas what many
people don't know is that a new back in
front end for ether Delta went out the
day after Byzantium and so also the
front end itself is a lot more live
prior to this update you may have
noticed that the order book was on the
60-second refresh cycle which was pretty
unbearable at times now the order book
is real-time and streaming into the
front end and so you shouldn't have the
situation anymore where there are sale
orders and you can't really get a sense
of where the real price is so the
remaining bottleneck here is really
aetherium itself if ether Delta gets the
same level of growth that it has
received since
since the beginning if more dap start
coming online and pushing significant
transaction volume then the ether delta
could be in the same spot again where
there are lots of pending transactions
and you can't get a trade done and so at
this point ether Delta is depending on a
theorem itself to to scale to the next
level if things continue as they've been
going so along with this back-end in
front and update there's a new API there
was an old rest-based API that people
were using to do trays to present data
the new socket based real-time API
should make it much easier to build
things like trading BOTS on top of the
ether Delta API or things that can work
with the data and display interesting
graphs or things like that so there are
two examples on the github there's a
maker Jas and a taker is the maker Jas
is an example of how you can use the API
to add liquidity meaning if you want to
start market making it by placing orders
in the order book in an automated
fashion maker Jas is an example of how
you can do that and then secondly take
our Dutch is as if you want to create
trades through the smart contract itself
there's an example of how you can do
that so maybe if you want to build a bot
that does both making and taking to
potentially do arbitrage is between
ether Delta order books or other trading
platforms for these different tokens and
those are of course available on the
github and there's also a document
describing the API and there is also the
the examples are in no js' if you are
interested in getting those examples
ported to other languages there are a
couple of bounties support them to
c-sharp and python those are the two
most popular languages the people are
asking questions about how they can do
the same thing in a language of their
choice so that's all I have thank you
for listening
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