Avoid getting scammed when trading on WAX or EOS!

🇪🇸 Read this article in Spanish / Lea este artículo en español 🇪🇸

AtomicHub's decision to remove Back Tokens from the Trade UI has made it harder for us to validate trades are as expected, however it is still possible to trade using back tokens safely with a bit of extra effort.

Why has this changed?

The WAX Marketplaces collectively lose revenue from back token trades as otherwise they would be able to collect 2% from each trade performed using the AtomicMarket Smart Contract - by pushing consumers towards the market rather than trades more revenue can be generated for marketplaces and collections.

This decision does however allow a malicious user to use a bot to create duplicate or mirror trades which confuse users into accepting an unfair trade (i.e. a worthless token for many valuable tokens).

You can read more about this scam in my full article.

How do I avoid getting scammed?

First and foremost, it's essential to recognise that if you accept an offer, neither AtomicHub or "WAX" can reverse the transaction; thus, checking trades carefully before you accept them is critical.

Instead of accepting from this page:

Screenshot of Atomic Assets Trade Offer

First click on the token you are receiving, and scroll down to the History section, click on the "Logs" tab and look for logbackasset:

Screenshot of Asset Logs

It's also possible to check the asset on NeftyBlocks by taking the AssetID from the URL:

https://wax.atomichub.io/explorer/asset/1099589082405
                                        ↑ ASSET  ID ↑

And paste it at the end of the following Nefty Blocks URL:

https://neftyblocks.com/assets/{{ASSET ID}}

You can then see "Backed Tokens" as one of the properties on the NFT:

Screenshot of Nefty Blocks User Experience, note: as this NFT was backed with 0.001 WAX it is rounded to 0 WAX

Are WAX backed trades ethical?

By circumventing market fees, collection fees and tokenomics fees we effectively trade for free so there is an argument that Back Token Trades are unfair and unethical - this is a similar argument as to why exchanges should honour royalties for Ethereum NFTs.

My personal opinion is these fees do not scale well for very large purchases on WAX - the cost of hosting a listing for a 1 WAX NFT is the same as hosting a listing for a 10,000 WAX NFT - yet the market fee would be five orders of magnitude different for the more expensive NFT.