Airswap (AST) Code Review
TM Rating: 84% |
Review Date: August 17, 2021 |
AirSwap is a peer-to-peer RFQ style trading network for Ethereum. Peers connect and agree on price through mutual cryptographic signatures, settling trades via atomic swap without any intermediaries. Every trade on AirSwap involves an RFQ server or a trader manually communicating prices over-the-counter (OTC). A simple combination of web protocols and smart contracts powers its RFQ (request-for-quote) style protocol. There are two kinds of liquidity providers on AirSwap: those running their own HTTP servers to provide liquidity and those managing on-chain delegates that swap on their behalf. Each swap is between two parties, a signer and a sender. The signer is the party that creates and cryptographically signs an order, and the sender is the party that sends the order to the Ethereum blockchain for settlement.
Airswap has an innovative approach to decentralized trading of tokens. Unlike automated market maker (AMM) exchanges such as Uniswap that run fully on-chain, AirSwap runs as a combination of off-chain (peer-to-peer negotiation) and on-chain (settlement by atomic swap). Doing so allows for no price slippage and trades of unlimited size. While it’s easier for everyday users to simply swap on Uniswap, RFQ is here to stay due to its strengths over AMM, especially if more users start using decentralized exchanges. In addition to that, the team behind the exchange consists of Consensys and Fluidity team members, both well-respected companies in the ecosystem. The token is trading on both centralized (Binance) and decentralized (Uniswap) exchanges.
