More Options To Trade RAM
EOS RAM trading has been the talk of the EOS town these past few weeks. We have had half the community in an uproar about the crazy high costs, and the other half in euphoria due to gains made with one member claiming to have turned 10,000 tokens into 80,000. Although that sounds far-fetched, the price exploded 4000%, so there is a high possibility his claim is true. You could always verify this by interrogating the blockchain if that sort of thing takes your fancy.
Regardless, there are many people out there, including me, that like the idea of trading RAM, including Block One themselves. So let's talk about the current RAM price situation, the leading proposals to improve price stability and finally, look at a centralized exchange which is looking to cash in on the hype.
No Adjustments To The BANCOR Relay Configuration
On July 4th, after the TMLG meeting, Dan posted a medium article saying that he believed that there was a misconfiguration in the BANCOR RELAY setup that needed adjusting to help settle down the price volatility in the RAM trading market.
Due to an unintentional configuration of the Bancor Relay weights on the EOS blockchain, this parameter is set at .05% rather than 50%. This introduces some heavy slippage for buying and selling large quantities and causes more volatility than desired.
We recommend updating this parameter to the intended value of 50%. The immediate effect of this change will be to temporarily lower the spot-price offered by the market maker. Market participants will be able to interact with the market maker to push it back toward market value. Keep in mind that under both the old and new values the free market is setting the price and the market maker is merely responding. This means that changing the parameter may create a buying or selling opportunity until the price returns to market value.
A day later after some testing, Dan retracted his statement that the BANCOR RELAY configuration was to blame for the spikes in price, saying it was merely down to the amount of 'buy' and 'sell' orders.
So it was back to the drawing board for the Block One team. Many people have put forward solutions to fix the 'issue' including BANCOR themselves. So far, the two leading contenders that are up for consideration are :
The correct solution to the RAM price mini saga would be to introduce the sidechain feature that allows dApp developers to select one of the side chains connected to the mainnet. dApp developers will be able to identify the side chain that has the lowest RAM cost. Unfortunately, Block One has stated that this feature will not be ready until the end of the year.
So what now? The community is still working on various options, discussing the pros and cons of each. In the meantime, Dan has cooked up another solution that we can only assume he will deliver sooner rather than later. Dan teased in telegram that he is working on a stop loss and buy/sell feature for RAM trading. Someone then asked Dan if they would be able to short RAM, and Dan replied yes, but with stipulations. If you want to short RAM, you must put up EOS as collateral to protect the lender. These kinds of features can only mean one thing, which is he is also working on, or working with someone on some form of a decentralized exchange for trading RAM. If you couple that with the hardware wallet coming to IOS devices soon, we will potentially be able to trade RAM on our mobile devices securely and from anywhere, that is sweet. There is no reason that these same features will not apply to the IPFS market too when it launches, as Block One will incorporate the learns learned from this RAM trading debacle.
A Centralized Exchange Offers EOS RAM trading Pairs
A Small cryptocurrency exchange located in India has started to offer EOS RAM trading pairs as of today. The exchange is bitbns.com, and he is a little bit about them:-
Our founding members are young and enthusiastic adopters of crypto currencies, all of whom graduated from IIT. Before we started Bitbns, we have created multiple products that have helped consumers in commerce decision making.
In late 2017, we decided to start a crypto-currency exchange. To give people a smooth entry into the world of crypto, we gave importance to ease of use, security, and customer support right from the beginning. Bitbns went live on December 14, 2017.
In just a few months, our focus proved right.
Unfortunately, the about me text scares the crap out of me. These guys have only been operating since December 2017, kudos for them for getting set up and rolling, they have done well but I cannot send the number of tokens I use to an exchange that young.
As much as like that fact that this is happening as it shows that EOS is getting a lot of attention, this has no place in the EOS ecosystem. The blockchain itself is already a massive decentralized exchange and the fee that we pay goes towards improving the platform. I do not know what fees these guys charge as the site would not let me sign up, but I can tell you to stay away from this as an option. Just wait for Dan to release whatever he is working on and if you want to get involved now, use the great tool at https://eos.feexplorer.io/#.