The age of DEXes is upon us and more options are becoming available. Epiphany is the latest to announce it's decentralized exchange project based on the NEO blockchain and it has an interesting design philosophy. Epiphany has no public ICO and a some of the tokens will be airdropped to the community.
EPIPHANY
Epiphany is the newest decentralized exchange to announce itself on the NEO blockchain. While competing projects have been started on the Ethereum and other blockchains, NEO's ecosystem is relatively young and the first DEXes are finally starting to appear. Of course there is the well-known upcoming NEON-Exchange (NEX) which should launch relatively soon, and the recently launched Switcheo exchange as well as Aphelion.
What sets Epiphany apart from these competitors is their design philosophy which is focused on being regulation compliant. As opposed to most DEX-solutions which are focused mainly on creating the technical possibility of exchanging, Epiphany actually focuses on creating a DEX with built-in features to comply with AML, KYC and customer protection laws. Epiphany aims to get a Money Transmitter License from every American state and has in fact obtained a few already.
In essence Epiphany will create a platform where it is not only possible to trade, but have other services built on-top as well. Various parties can use the Epiphany platform to provide their services, such as FIAT gateways (after undergoing strict compliance screenings), as well as settlement and brokerage services. Contrary to regular DEXes, everything in Epiphany will follow existing financial laws and guidelines which mean that the existing financial order has as little as possible friction to get onboard.
THE TOKEN
One other interesting aspect of Epiphany is their EPN token. The EPN token itself is very similar to the Binance BNB-token: the main feature appears to be a reduced trading fee on the platform, which is a model that has worked exceptionally well for Binance. Additional features of the token are voting rights, pre-emptive rights on the Epiphany eco-system (early ICO access, I imagine) and Epiphany will have a quarterly 20% buy-back scheme - also similar to Binance's token.The token distribution model is different from most cryptocurrencies, as Epiphany has not done a public ICO. Instead they are backed by private investors and institutions. Many in the community see this as a positive move, believing that ICO's lead to ICO-whales who dump on the market for a quick flip and thereby hurting the project's advancement.
Epiphany has reserved 10% of all the tokens for community development, and a fair deal of this will be airdropped to the community. EPN is scheduled to be distributed starting on July 10th 2018, according to their roadmap.
EPN AIRDROP
The EPN airdrop is still ongoing and for providing your e-mail address and linking your NEO address you are elligble to receive 30 EPN tokens. Furthermore, they offer extra earnings if you regularly sign in to press a button (a form of Proof-of-Existence/Interest?). They also have a referral program, like many other airdrops, where you get 15 additional EPN for everybody you refer.
You can sign up to receive the 30 free EPN tokens by going to: https://www.epnex.io/sign.html
This above link is without a referral code of mine, but I'd highly appreciate it if you used my referral code 00h6qzP during sign-up. Contrary to most airdrops which require a lot of steps and information, I found this airdrop to be pretty hassle-free. All you need is an e-mail address and a NEO address.
Although it is often said that decentralized exchanges will become 'the next big thing', the amount of DEX projects is starting to get rather large and it's getting to be hard to determine which one will come out on top. For this reason alone I am getting more and more hesitant to see DEX projects as a good investment choice, despite their potential. Of course we saw the growth of Binance, and even Kucoin doing pretty well for a while, but there are ofcourse also tales such as COSS.io which is now priced 15x as low as it's all-time-high. Ouch!
DEXes are in their infancy, too. While I love using DEXes and try to use them whenever I can, their primary limiting factor so far has been the fact they are constrained to one ecosystem. Ethereum-based DEXes will let you trade ETH and ERC-20 tokens, but not anything else. The case is similar to NEO-based DEXes as well. Of course all of them are working on interoperability, so that it becomes possible to exchange NEO-based tokens for Ethereum-based tokens and vice versa but the true honeypot lies in the ability to trade Bitcoin decentrally - something which most of these DEXes have not been able to figure out yet.
Still, despite my doubts and the fact I stopped investing in DEX projects, I'm okay with hodling some free EPN tokens from the airdrop to see where it goes. Free money, more tokens, so crypto!
Click here to visit the official Epiphany website
