Decred has published the specifications for its upcoming decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX). The Decred DEX will reportedly execute trades using atomic swaps and will be a non-custodial platform, with assets exclusively traded directly between clients, blockchain-to-blockchain.

According to the DEX’s draft documentation that was recently published on GitHub, Decred’s DEX adopted atomic swaps in order to “facilitate “peer-to-peer trades, while disincentivizing manipulative or abusive trading patterns, and utilizing an independently verifiable order matching algorithm that is difficult to game by traders and operators alike.”

Decred DEX Does Away With Trading Fees

The Decred DEX is designed to match trades between clients seeking to exchange differing crypto assets, with trades executed by a “trustless atomic swap negotiation process” that is secured by the cryptographic guarantees of the blockchains underpinning the crypto assets in question.

The documentation describes most decentralized exchanges as operating through replacing trusted third parties with either “a blockchain or a token,” thus “insert[ing[ their own products as a means to capture the trading fees.”

In a Twitter post, Decred has claimed that operating using atomic swaps will allow its DEX to be “fair,” asserting that orders will be “pseudorandomly matched within epochs, negating the advantages of [high-frequency-traders] and front-running.”

The GitHub documentation states that a custom order matching procedure will be adopted to “mitigate common abusive trading patterns associated with high-frequency trading algorithms and other bot-driven activity.”

Decred claims that it DEX is “anti-rent-seeking,” with the exchange slated to have “no trading fees” and “no intermediary coins or tokens.” The company claims that the elimination of per-trade fees “disincentivizes deceptive bookkeeping practices commonly observed in centralized exchanges,” citing a study that estimated more than 95% of reported exchange volume comprises wash trading.

Decred also highlighting that “any compatible coin” able to integrate on the DEX at their own discretion while incurring “minimal” developmental costs.

Komodo Launches AtomicDEX for Mobile

At the start of July, Komodo (KMD) announced that it’s atomic swap-powered DEX had entered public beta testing on Android. Like the Decred DEX, Komodo’s decentralized exchange also operates off-chain through atomic swaps.

The chief technology officer of Komodo, Kadan Stadelmann, stated: “The biggest benefit in this trustless manner is that the atomic swap protocol won’t allow any participant to scam the other participant. We have hashes and timelocks that won’t allow the spending of funds unless specific conditions are met.”