Exchange outreach

General Counterparty
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For direct updates on progress and how you can help: see the following post Exchange outreach - #2 by monkey

If you want to read the rationale on why this thread has been created-- rant below

Exchange Outreach

It has come to my attention that over the course of the past several years, we, collectively as a community of this leaderless, decentralized organization have not done much in the way of exchange outreach. And that’s a bit of an understatement.

I have scoured through CMC and the various other aggregators and I see one thing in common. Vast, vast majority of coins have presence on 10, 15, 20,30 exchanges. Often with multiple pairings. Literally almost Every.Single.One, at least in the first couple of pages (check for yourself)

In contrast the past 3 years Counterparty has not been added to a single new exchange. And has never got more than a single pairing. Why? Honestly, I think nobody even properly took the time to research and contact new exchanges!!

Counterparty started off on the two major,most popular exchanges at the time (Bittrex and Poloniex, in a great position- then- xcp became a top 5 even competing against much more well funded competitors.

times slowly changed and more and more exchanges came, they took the crown away from poloniex and bittrex, the pay-to-list thing took off for a bit but I literally don’t believe we as a community ever really actually got in any serious dialog with any of the new exchanges that were becoming popular-- we got complacent the existing ones always stick around and remain popular, even though their volume has decreased 90% and the markets have expanded massively - Counterparty was one of the few (only?) projects NOT added to Bittrex’s highly popular Korean offshoot upbit which was a huge let-down, means it pretty much entirely missed out on exposure from an entire country that had a burgeoning interest in crypto-

meanwhile other projects were dedicating significant time and effort to reaching out to exchanges- and that shows. Sure, many were ICO’s that paid to play, some got listed just out of defaultness like litecoin and xrp, but others put in a lot more effort and it certainly didn’t hurt.

These exchanges are onramps and offramps. Discoverability points. Sometimes for huge segments of the market (e.g Korea, Thailand, Russia, China) Vast majority of volume centers around Asia.

Exchanges aren’t just for speculators, daytraders and other such groups they’re showcases- shopwindows- someone tha discovers a coin on an exchange can become community members, supporters, Holders, builders, evangelists, partners. Liquidity is a good thing. Liquidity provides a stable, secure foundation.

It gives people confidence the project is not going anywhere. That even if they cannot rely on the price of any particular coin staying the same, they can rely on there being places to exchange. If one is down, no problem. This is what decentralization is all about. No single failure point. Turns out we had only a couple of centralized points after 5 years that has been a sticking point that has stifled counterpartys growth massively (yes, I’m aware there is literally an inbuilt decentralized exchange- but I’m sure you get the point)

And with counterparty that’s especially important because as counterparty is not just a fork of btc that you hold and pretend it’ll one day be used to buy starbucks with, it’s a framework to be built upon and interacted with, XCP other than being an anti-spam fee for registrations, and potentially finding further use e.g as gas in a VM- it’s is the base liquidity token that projects can interface with, Apps. Games. Collectibles and so on.

These frameworks are a much better position if the underlying base token is widely exchangeable. Doesn’t matter what the price even is, just that it’s widely exchangeable. People will self-determine the value after that. Nobody would be interested denominated things in ETH if it was illiquid. Nobody ‘serious’ paid serious attention to BTC when it was highly illiquid, it wasn’t ready for entire swathes of use-cases, or groups of people to even pay it any mind, back in gox days.

In general, nobody wants to hold anything that’s illiquid lest they end up ‘holding a bag’. But you take that same thing and ‘just add liquidity’ without otherwise changing the properties and suddenly it is in a much better position for growth. Much better position for people to actually determine it’s value. Liquidity begets liquidity and vice versa. With decent liquidity or at least avenues for it, community grows, instead of shrinks. Morale is positive instead of negative. This is good not just for the platform itself but anything built on top of it.

The plain and simple reason counterparty dipped so extremely is not because of something drastic like a hack, not because of weak fundamentals, not because of anything else primarily but lack of liquidity. Some holders felt uneasy. They were spooked with a short deadline to hold or dump and they didn’t have confidence there would be another liquidity source in future. They were stood at the end of a cliff and told on a megaphone “we’re taking the cushions away next week”. Some who don’t make fundamental long-term decisions about why they got in just got scared given such an ultimatum and jumped. The same thing happened with BTC and gox. (except in this case, nothings missing) The recent dump was artificially brought on and exaggerated greatly

The same would happen to any other coin, does not matter how good it is, how interesting it is. Ethereum or $insert_top_coin would be close to zero too now if it was delisted everywhere overnight and only available on tux exchange (no offence to tux)

Perspective
Reading the following link: Ravencoin Wiki was a sobering moment for me.
Please read it too.

This is a detailed log of ravencoins community outreach to exchanges in the past year. In the past year the ravencoin community, quite admirably, has gone from being listed on ZERO exchanges with a zero market cap and just an OTC sheet (where counterparty is now more or less) to being listed on over 40 exchanges with a one billion fully diluted market cap, proving that the idea of a token system (without all the complexity and cruft of a ‘world’ computer) is viable. Proving there is interest in the idea.

This is an Idea counterparty came up with

Half of the exchanges RVN got listed on were achieved during the time period when raven did not actually even have any kind of assets. It was literally just a bitcoin fork with a changed PoW. The binance listing alone which happened in october jumpstarted their volume from $180K a day before the ann across 5 exchanges including bittrex and upbit (XCP was $450k on same day between bittrex and poloniex which generally got less vol than upbits KRW pairing ) to $175M ,the listing meant a dozen articles describing what RVN is and what it’s used for went out overnight,the number of participants in their telegram two fold. No difference in the code but a sudden HUGE difference in exposure.

We already know the problem is not that this project sucks, it’s not that there’s no point, that there’s no use case, no market. Quite the opposite. The issue is that so many don’t even know it exists. it launched in the shadows in 2014 when tokens weren’t a thing, when the space with a lot smaller. It’s on no exchanges. Almost nobody knows about it to even be able to interact with it. that’s the MAIN reason it’s where it’s at now. Simple.

Counterparty has an edge

Vitalik Buterin: “I was involved in the colored coins project for a few months before I moved to my position that MSC/XCP-style systems are strictly superior to CC in basically every possible way (and moved to Ethereum full-time, but I will say that Ethereum is not superior to CC in every possible way because it is not directly based on Bitcoin so doesn’t have as nice interoperability properties… my personal opinion is that XCP-style meta-consensus systems are the next generation from here, at least as far as Bitcoin-based protocols are concerned”

Sergio Demain Lerner (Rootstock creator and Bitcoin contributor): “Keeping the counterparty source code small and independent of the network client is a great design decision, from the point of view of security. Because of this Counterparty client is the smallest, readable and yet completely usable “alt-coin” I’ve ever seen.”

Peter Todd (Prominent BTC contributor ) on a technical level using a token [like counterparty] rather than a two-way-peg [sidechains] has the advantage of security: who owns what tokens is defined by the Bitcoin blockchain, and changing that record requires you to 51% attack Bitcoin as a whole

^^ Remember what these folks said RE:counterparty?. Counterparty really does offer some unique benefits. Built for tokens and immutable (unlike RVN which will implement tags/restrictions invalidating that premise) Strong security, Native interoperability with bitcoin, inbuilt DEX- existing asset ecosystem. Time-tested. Long term development, No sky high inflation or concerns with miner abandonment once that sky-high inflation tails off, no turing complete vectors, no complex code audits on issuances, Perhaps one of the easiest asset creation systems around (especially new wallets like freeport) These features never got a chance to shine.

TLDR
Since 2014 when counterparty was lauched in the shadows before the token revolution really even was on anyones lips the cryptospace has grown and evolved drastically. Counterparty never kept up with exchange pace, completely missed out on a BUNCH of exposure and resultingly suffered. Now is the time to realize this and work collectively to correct with the same energy a new project would do.

The future, and how it can be brighter

There’s some reassurance here. Why? out of those 41 exchanges that RVN has so far been listed on, not a single one of them was a paid listing At least 8 exchanges voluntarily listed RVN (mostly after Binance led the way) but the rest came as a direct result of the community members requesting a listing/filling a form

XCP and RVN share the same decentralized, cypherpunk, open-source ethos that projects like DCR and grin have wrt listings. An ethos that used to be the norm but temporarily got sidelined by dubious ICO’s that will no doubt slowly mostly fade away along with those entities that survived solely of extorting ICO’s for listings. The markets are wiser, more mature. A focus on quality, innovative non ICO projects is an ethos which is coming back into fashion.

Counterparty is essentially at ground-zero, day one right now. The wiki is a blueprint of how another project grew from day one from nothing to something major- How a project left obscurity into the limelight. this is evidence-- at least on the exchange front that we as a community can help grow XCP too.

What next
I will be beginning work on adapting this wiki page to counterparty specific outreach efforts. In the interim, I will be posting a temporary basic version as a forum thread here- and encourage anybody to post with feedback, (e.g specific exchanges not already included on the list that might be worth reaching out to.)

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A Trello board for checking progress and contributing to the exchange listing efforts is hosted above. If you wish to contribute to efforts or check progress, please use the above link.

I will take continual brief excerpts of progress and keep it updated in this thread also.

Outreach- June- work in progress
Rather than starting out by hitting up coinbase (let’s pace ourselves)
I have contacted several challenger exchanges that prioritize listing of coins with real use-case, fair launch (no ICO) and aren’t afraid of listing coins that are slightly harder to integrate or that aren’t already top 15. Admirable ethos and I felt these were a good fit to get in touch with, have a respectable mentality, seem ethical, competent and would take the listing request into serious consideration. I think quality over quantity is a more sensible strategy so will prioritize these for now and continue identifying viable candidates and beginning discussions at a later date continually.

Current status (will be updated)

  • June 8th- Reached out and received an initial response from exchange #1 – they are currently evaluating the project
  • June 8th- Received an initial response from exchange #2 that counterparty is up for consideration- it has also secondary received a secondary vouch by a contributor endorsing it as a viable candidate for potential listing.
  • June 15th- Exchange #3 self listed counterparty on it’s platform
  • June 17th – Reached out to exchange #4 and #5 that seem to be respectable decent platforms with a good track record. Competent with good support. Awaiting response
  • June 19th – Received a response from exchange #4. Listing should be possible. Discussion and updates will continue after the next counterparty update

Current centralized exchange status (will be updated)

  • Zaif (only for Japanese clientele)
  • Tux exchange
  • SatoEX – new addition June 15th

------------------New listing overviews----------

Update 1# June 15th, 2019
XCP received a new listing on SatoEX.

SatowalletEx is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange located in UAE. It was established in 2017, currently reports a 24-hour trading volume of Ƀ979.73 from 90 coins. Coingecko reports normalized volume is $310,000 and SimilarWeb monthly visits of 8,343

The three listed pairs are as follows:

  • XCP/DOGE
  • XCP/USDT
  • XCP/SATO
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Very good post, and the Ravencoin wiki is quite illuminating. Let’s definitely follow that example.

I just noted on the foundation thread, that I noticed Bittrex is paying really high fees on their sends. For instance, 6 hours ago, an address had 9 XCP sent to it, and the BTC miner fee paid was 0.001. So, Bittrex paid $8 in BTC and retained $0.10 in XCP with their 0.2 XCP withdrawal fee. Exchanges need to collect a BTC fee rather than an XCP fee when withdrawing, otherwise they are guaranteed to lose money. This might be a reason for delisting.

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@ Jess, This is exactly it and you’re right the metalayer model (2 daemons) is more complex than hosting just one daemon, most specifically the fee model (this is what another tier 2 exchange owner had told me long time ago- his personal stance if there is this was more flexible he would list, just from his individual view of the project)

example of his gripe: someone with zero btc balance deposits small amount 2 XCP, then attempts to withdraw later without trading,(no fees collected) exchange either has to 1) pay that BTC withdrawal fee on behalf of the client and just charge xcp to the client to cover
or
2) require customer to deposit btc, if they haven’t already got in their account to cover the withdrawal fee- either case the fee is taken from a seperate wallet and they have to keep that topped up separately, can’t take directly from the customers standard btc hot wallet.

This isn’t a problem if 1 xcp is a stable price- (e.g 50 USD) and it costs a fixed 0.01 ($0.50) xcp to withdraw and btc fee is stable (at $0.05 for example) – the exchange can simply debit xcp reliably- and cover the fees with room to spare- and without much worry- but things gets more problematic if xcp goes down whilst btc fee goes way up suddenly - e.g when 0.01 xcp is instead $0.01 and btc transaction fee quickly jumps from median $0.05 to $2 (like during the mempool spam attacks recently) -

sure other coins value goes up and down and the withdrawal fee’s have to be adjusted too. (for example BTC itself) this ideal fee can be calculated and should be adjusted automatically in many cases, so the exchange isn’t ever at a loss- but a seperate wallet doesn’t have to be maintained to ‘cover’ these fees-- it’s just a little bit more work for them and not everyone wants to put in extra work

Some less technically savvy exchanges ultimately decided they don’t even want to maintain multiple daemons (e.g ltc, xrp etc) and instead only list ERC tokens. Less work.

The same issue exists with Omni, it’s just there is practically no choice for exchanges to not list Omni if they don’t have fiat pairs and want the benefits of TUSD exposure (they absolutely do).

If transactions were natively able to be debited with XCP (such as mentioned in MPMA CIP) exchanges would be able to look upon it much more favorably. Or if BTC fees didn’t suddenly spike, or if XCP didn’t dip situation would also be nicer.

There are a number of suggestions that could make the process much smoother and more attractive for liquidity gatekeepers- for instance bridging or pegging the XCP token to another type of construct (e.g BEP-2, ERC20) as a number of others projects are sensibly increasingly doing and will continue to do so, even projects with their own chains- this approach is something that increases interoperability with other standards and also increases liquidity avenues – e.g opens up to third-party DEX’s (which is exactly what a base-level token should be, liquid- not hard to obtain/acquire or not walled away- if it’s hard to obtain, discovery and usage is artificially stunted. It’s kept ‘secret’) - You even see wrapped BTC on ethereum for example, this exposes BTC to ethereum users. It makes sense.

I’m not intimately familiar with the drivechain/sidechain proposal but my understanding is that assets on this sidechain (e.g xcp) could be broadcast without the limitations of (currently) expensive BTC sends. If so, that would be super helpful and very beneficial, and probably the most optimal path forward in general (even though fees on btc-mainchain will come down eventually) this would be desirable not just to end-users or projects building on counterparty but to liquidity gatekeepers like exchanges, essentially would be a net-win for all. So that’s definately a really cool proposal.

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Outstanding post @monkey ! :clap:

Have you made a wikipage like Raven to start working? It would also be interesting to have a telegram or slack channel to talk about that and coordinate our actions :slight_smile:

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Indeed. Keeping Counterparty on mainnet is pretty much dead. Fees will be to high.
There a sidechain project working on for XCP though:
https://www.hazama.indiesquare.me/

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On Bittrex FoldingCoin FLDC is still listed for international customers. FLDC is a counterparty token. So counterparty is still on bittrex but not for the XCP token.

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Is Folding coin going to use Hazama to save on fees?
Could even get Bittrex to use Hazama as well for Folding coin.

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Isn’t Hazama to be used for every counterparty token?

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Well it can be used but from what I read it isn’t mandatory so up to dev to adopt it and bring more use to it ie switch services to the sidechain.

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Not meaning to hijack the thread… i think trello works a LOT better for this kind of thing.

Just created a trello for this, anyone’s invited to join and start adding tasks.

EDIT: Join by clicking this link https://trello.com/invite/b/YEMPnD2D/01ff64302d341aa4146d4cedb3495b29/exchange-outreach

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Thank @chiguireitor for starting that trello board, I’m not familiar with the workflow but I’ve heard good things about it being a great tool for collaborative brainstorming so I’ll get up to speed with it and get it populated. @Anyone, feel free to contribute! will pin trello board to the first post and focus on using that, but also will keep this main thread updated with key snippets for those checking in here.

Also, first update

Update 1# June 15th, 2019
XCP received a new listing on SatoEX.

SatowalletEx is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange located in UAE. It was established in 2017, currently reports a 24-hour trading volume of Ƀ979.73 from 90 coins. Coingecko reports normalized volume is $310,000 and SimilarWeb monthly visits of 8,343

The three listed pairs are as follows:

  • XCP/DOGE

  • XCP/USDT

  • XCP/SATO

Awaiting developments in outreach for two other exchanges contacted. Much more work to be done in this space in the coming months!

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Hi all,

XCP trading on Zaif is taking off. I wonder if something is going on behind the scenes?

https://zaif.jp/trade/xcp_jpy

BTW the price at Tux exchange is MUCH lower. I guess there aren’t enough people with accounts at both exchanges to perform arbitrage and bring the prices in line with one another.

It appears that Zaif is not accepting new account applications.

https://zaif.jp/verify_email

Fisco, which acquired Zaif, has a separate exchange that was originally based on the Zaif exchange software, so they are probably thinking that they need to combine the two exchanges into a single exchange. I assume that the new combined exchange will continue to list XCP, as it was lucky enough to be included in the list of cryptocurrencies approved by the Ministry of Finance (thanks to the hard work by Tech Bureau and Takao Asayama).

Fisco does not seem to have an English trading interface. Hopefully when they combine the two exchanges they will offer an English interface for international investors/traders.

To continue for XCP to have multiple listings would be healthy for reliable price discovery, and hopefully arbitrage opportunities.

The XCP community needs to get XCP listed on other major exchanges.

Cheers,

Ijin

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I noticed FISCO listed here first Public companies with exposure to the crypto space | BitMEX Blog and later that they pioneered some of the first bitcoin bonds and crypto fund

Fisco token is even listed on the blockchain, using counterparty https://xchain.io/asset/FSCC#
https://corp.zaif.jp/en/faq/7328/

assume that the new combined exchange will continue to list XCP, as it was lucky enough to be included in the list of cryptocurrencies approved by the Ministry of Finance (thanks to the hard work by Tech Bureau and Takao Asayama).

Yes, the approval is great news. I see in Japan there is good level of organic usage of CounterParty as a platform and an ecosystem. E.G Avacus. The AVA-SAKE popup bar is so cool!
I think a HAZAMA launch and interoperability with bitcoin/bitcoin based standards means there is plenty of potential ahead-- I think bitcoin tokenization is huge in future with plenty of bigger entities looking into it-- IMO counterparty can be one of the best base-level platforms for issuance and trade, but it’s definitely important to get more visibility with other exchanges, which is why I’m focused on doing so with this thread and will endeavor to do over the coming months.

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Hi Monkey, thanks for the informative reply.

I wasn’t aware that the Fisco token was based on counterparty!

I just checked and the Caika coin, which is listed on the Fisco exchange, is also a counterparty based token.

Caica is a publicly listed company.

https://www.caica.jp/e-toppage/

NCXC is a similar token (based on counterparty, listed at Fisco, and issued by a publicly listed company).

https://ncxxgroup.co.jp/en

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Hi @monkey Did you contact Upbit for listing request? I think liquidity threre is pretty good

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This is a very good point.
I think a big reason why people are hesitant to go back or promote XCP is the confusion on what the token XCP does and how does Counterparty plan to scale offchain.

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Yes, Upbit liquidity is good. Have not contacted them yet, focusing on dialog with smaller but more nimble exchanges “challengers” for now, they are generally a bit more ameniable to listing smaller (in terms of cap) projects, I think it makes more sense to start with those, then aim for for others. We have to start as if we are a day one project and regain visibility.

This is a very good point.
I think a big reason why people are hesitant to go back or promote XCP is the confusion on what the token XCP does and how does Counterparty plan to scale offchain.

With several fee-reduction and offchain scaling techniques now proposed (e.g segwit, hazama) I think counterparty will be much better positioned for larger exchanges again (as exchanges have to factor in withdrawal fees and so on and this was a sticking point) Rest assured it is a goal.

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The fact that Upbit share its order books with Bittrex wouldn’t be a problem?

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For BTC pairing, yes, but not for KRW pairing since the liquidity there doesn’t come to/from Bittrex- Probably not the best one to start with yet however.

Update: Received response from 3rd exchange and updated Exchange outreach post accordingly. Listing talks pending post next counterparty update

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