Komodo (KMD) has seen an impressive price bump, since news hit a few days ago that the Komodo-powered atomicDEX had entered its open public beta testing stage. As first reported by Decrypt media, atomicDEX (or, decentralized exchange) allows atomic swap trading specifically from mobile phones.

Price has climbed to about $1.80 at time of writing, from about $1.30 before the news hit – an impressive rise of almost 40%.

KMD runup(source: CryptoCompare)

On the TradingView chart below, we can see that volume on the KMD/BTC trading pair has also seen a strong bump since the news.

KMD growing volume(source: TradingView.com)

Komodo is widely traded on ultra-popular exchanges like Binance, and currently has a market capitalization of just over $200 million according to CryptoCompare. We note that KMD/BTC, like many other altcoins, is currently skipping across all-time lows.

KMD/BTC nearly at ATL(source: TradingView.com)

Komodo, atomicDEX, and Atomic Swaps

Built atop ZCash’s privacy features, Komodo is a blockchain project whose main purpose is to facilitate decentralized, private transactions between diverse blockchains – to trade Bitcoin for Ethereum for example.

Komodo claim that atomicDEX is “compatible with 99 percent of assets including Bitcoin, all UTXO-based coins, Ether and ERC-20 tokens, and any coin that supports time- and hash-locked payments.” For now, only a handful of assets are supported on the beta but more are sure to come soon.

Only a handful -- for now(source: Atomicdex.io)

Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann told CryptoGlobe, in an interview earlier this year, that atomic swaps are essentially a way to “exchange knowledge in a trustless way.” He went on to say that he thinks that “the technology the use cases are endless, as it’s very promising.” Another decentralized exchange, Switcheo, launched its own atomic swap capability earlier this year.

With Binance’s recent move to “geofence” its own DEX from U.S. users, among some other countries, the contest to define exactly what a DEX is seems to be heating up – and some would not consider Binance’s DEX worthy of the title.