Building Africa’s first decentralized peer-to peer cypto trading platform
Swapmonkey, a decentralized Peer to Peer crypto swapping platform where users instantly trade crypto assets through swapping from a safe, fast, and secure decentralized liquidity pool.
- Date2021
- RoleUX strategy, Wireframing, UI Design, Prototyping, Customer Interviews
Problem Statement
The central monetary authority in Nigeria around February banned commercial banks from directly facilitating payment for cryptocurrency exchanges. After the announcement, we noticed a noise dive in the transaction volume, the company had to quickly innovate around this to reinvigorate the transaction volume and continue serving the users without violating any policy regulation.
- How might we we facilitate crypto trading for users without breaking policy rules?
- How might reinvigorates the rapidly declining transaction volume as a result of the ban?
- How might we make trading crypto more secure and faster?
of the complaint we received were of delayed and slow transactions
User retention dropped 32%
Solutions
Swap on Request
The first iteration was primary to address the effect of the policy ban. This is the MVP of Swapmonkey. After the ban, We decided not to go through the traditional route of peer-to-peer trading like other brands did. In this case, we created the “instant swap” option where assets from a decentralized liquidity pool will be made available instantly into a users’ wallet immediately a swap is initiated and authorized. In order to prevent interfacing with the bank which would break the outlined policy made by the central monetary authority.
Manual Swap
After the initial release, we conducted fresh new interviews with users and most indicated interest to have more control over the way they intend to trade their assets. For buyers, they made us understand that it was increasingly getting expensive to use the “instant swap” option. We had to redesign the flow to support this new feature in order to solve this user pain point. This method works like the peer to peer method. Here buyers search through listings while sellers can also list their asset for sale. We examined existing platforms and how they worked.
We also spoke to a few users who also use these platforms. We discovered 2 underlying problems that marred this method:
- Trade listers suffered from blockchain transfer charges by having to fulfill many orders regardless of the quantity purchased. In most cases, these charges are fixed. At the end of day, they lose profits to charges.
- There were severe cases of false payments made to the seller.
We solved this problem by using the Hicks law.
By ensuring the quantity of assets a buyer can buy is not open ended, a buyer is compelled to swap either 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% or 100% of the listed asset. For sellers, manual swap served as a cheaper alternative to swap.
To ensure security and transaction transparency, swapmonkey provided the escrow feature in which all assets included in the listing will be locked and will only be made available to both parties upon successful swap.
A simple and intuitive way to create swap listing (.gif) Step in listing
- Select tokens you want to swap
- Set minimum and available amount
- Set your swap rate
- Publish
Reworked Manual Swap
We reiterated on the second design after a brainstorming and a few loopholes were discovered.
- Swapping in percentages distorts the volume of the asset left to swap in a listing. In the case where 100% of a swap is not made by a buyer, refactoring the remaining percentage of assets left between 20% -100% messes up the volume of the asset in the trade. It therefore becomes an endless cycle
- From research, buyers come to the platform to buy a particular fiat value of crypto. By using the percentage method, there is a very high chance that the percentages stated is either higher or lower than the buyers budget, hence a mismatch
To remedy this, we reverted back to the open mechanism of allowing a user input the amount of asset type he wishes to buy from the asset listed. An intuitive filtering method is also implemented to allow users filter through the listings based on what they intend to swap
