I recently came across a surprising statisticāāāForkDelta, the forked version of decentralized exchange EtherDelta, is quietly doing 1 million dollars per day(!) in daily trading volume. While that number is quite small in the context of global trading volumes for crypto, thereās a story here that is worth talking about.
ForkDelta Origins
But first, some history. It all started last December, when things over at EtherDelta started to get real bizarre even by crypto standards. Hereās a brief timeline of events:
Mid December:Ā EtherDelta is quietly sold to new investors
December 21:Ā EtherDelta gets hacked and user funds are stolen
December 30:Ā EtherDelta announces a bizarre ICO that looks like a scam
As you might have guessed, it wasnāt very long after this that the trust between EtherDelta and its users was completely destroyed. Just 5 days the ICO announcement,Ā Reddit user u/freeatnet notified the communityĀ that he was creating ForkDelta:
And thus the ForkDelta era began!
More like āForkā Delta (forĀ now)
If you look at the ForkDelta website today, youāll see that its user experience closely resembles the old EtherDelta website. This is because the ForkDelta development team mostly copied the old EtherDelta codebase (which was publicly available on GitHub) to create its own exchange.
Whatās most surprising though (and something that doesnāt appear to be common knowledge) is thatĀ the old EtherDelta smart contract is still being used at the moment,Ā which means ForkDelta users are still paying trading fees to EtherDelta!Ā I would have thought that it would been trivial to swap out the smart contractās beneficiary wallet, but that is apparently not the case āthe EtherDelta team (whoever they are) continues to take aĀ .3% cut from all trades!
When is a new smart contract getting deployed that no longer pays fees to EtherDelta? According to theĀ ForkDelta developer roadmap, itās not slated until Q3 2018:
Thatās quite a ways away, but with a small developer team that is self-funded and running only on donations, there doesnāt appear to be a faster way.
Closing thoughts
All things considered, Iām seriously impressed by the ForkDelta teamās efforts to create a community-owned decentralized exchange that is transparent with its users. They clearly have their work cut out for them to be a successful standalone dapp, but Iāll be watching closely to see if they can do it and I wish them the best of luck. If they can pull it off, it will be one of the earliest examples of a successful dapp fork in the young history of crypto!
Interested in donating to the ForkDelta project?Ā Here is their ETH address.