StellarX, a digital asset marketplace gateway that will reportedly not charge any usage fees, recently completed its beta testing stage and has now been launched. StellarX has been developed by InterStellar – which is a commercial entity established through an acquisition of Chain, Inc. by the Stellar Development Foundation-associated Lightyear Corporation.
“Zero Usage Fee” P2P MarketPlace
Before the acquisition, Chain, Inc. operated a fintech firm focusing on the development of cloud-based blockchain financial infrastructure. Lightyear Corporation is a for-profit organization that aims to manage products and services developed using the Stellar protocol – which defines the specification of crypto-to-fiat cross-border transactions involving any pair of currencies.
In addition to facilitating zero-fee trading of crypto assets, StellarX allows users to trade traditional bonds, commodities, and fiat currencies through a peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace.
Because all trades on StellarX occur on the Stellar payment network, users have to pay negligible network usage fees in Lumens (XLM) – which are the native tokens of the crypto platform. However, these fees will reportedly be reimbursed, or returned to users’ accounts, by StellarX at the end of its monthly billing cycle.
Notably, the StellarX platform works as a gateway by providing a user-friendly interface for traders to gain access to Stellar’s decentralized multi-asset marketplace. The trading interface makes it easier to make USD deposits as StellarX has partnered with Changelly – a crypto exchange service that serves as a mediator between digital currency trading desks and users.
Transactions “Settled In Seconds”
All transactions on StellarX are “settled in seconds”, according to its official website; and the platform is expected to launch a “market maker rewards” program in the fall – which will pay out “100K XLM to the top market makers each week.”
Funds may be more secure on StellarX compared to other trading platforms because it does not keep users’ private keys as it is a decentralized marketplace portal. However, many assets tradable on StellarX are tethered, meaning they’ve been issued by third-party contracts that claim to “guarantee ownership of the underlying asset”, InvestInBlockchain notes.
Tethered tokens or assets may involve a certain level of risk because users would have to trust the third-parties that issue them. Although tethered assets are clearly labeled as such on StellarX, users who purchase them are only able to make withdrawals through the third-party websites that issued the tokens.
The developers of StellarX plan to let users withdraw assets directly from the platform’s interface in the future. At present, the P2P marketplace supports the trading of approximately 2,500 Stellar-based tokens while listing an average of 50 additional tokens each week.
