E*Trade Financial Group, an online trading firm preps to offer cryptocurrency trading on its platform, initially starting off with bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), as reported by Bloomberg on April 26 quoting sources familiar with the matter.
Being one of the largest online trading platforms, E*Trade’s incline towards cryptocurrency is purportedly a significant step forward towards cryptocurrency adoption. As per the annual report filed by E*Trade with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Dec. 31, 2018, the total asses reported were over $65 billion, with 4.9 million brokerage accounts and a total margin receivables balance of $9.6 billion.
Another online securities trading platform, Robinhood made the leap into the cryptocurrency space, which enabled the platform to briefly overtake E*Trade in the number of trading accounts, in May 2018. At that time, Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt said:
“Crypto has certainly added to our growth. In the next couple of years, I think you’ll see Robinhood looking like a full-service consumer finance company.”
Read more:Wirex Launched Twenty-Six New Stablecoins On Stellar Network
Image Source – E*Trade Twitter
Developers from the cryptocurrency startup – Altcoin Exchange – are now open-sourcing technology which allows for automatic trading between the Ethereum and Bitcoin Blockchains. Altcoin Exchange claims this to be the first “atomic-swap” in terms of market value between the two largest cryptocurrencies.
The code is now available on GitHub and will facilitate a large number of developers to build their own code on the top of this. By using Altcoin’s tech, developers will be able to lock a certain specified number of Ether tokens in Ethereum smart contracts. Once the tokens are locked, the funds associated with smart tokens will only be sent when the same amount of Bitcoin is sent to a bitcoin address in a specific time window.
However, this is still in the experimental stage of its development, but the ability to swap assets between two Blockchains is a first step towards replacing the centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.
The existence of such an atomic-swap cannot be considered as a feasible and viable option as on date. The reason being that such one-to-one exchange between Bitcoin and Ethereum can’t be considered a fair trade considering both are trading at different valuations and will even continue to do so in the future.
Andrew Gazdecki, CEO of Altcoin Exchange said that the current exercise is only for a demonstration purpose of direct trade and the next step of development will involve transferring of Ethereum to Bitcoin by comparing the two with their dollar equivalent valuations or any other fiat currencies.
This means that there is still plenty of work to be done at the back-end before such atomic trades could possibly see the light of the day anytime soon.
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