Howdy folks, I'm here today to announce a new token listing feature for Hive Engine. Until now, only the Engine team has had the ability to add tokens to our deposit & withdrawal gateways for connectivity with external blockchains. But now we're going to hand some of that power over to you!
As of now, anyone can get an Ethereum ERC20 token listed for trading on Hive Engine, for a listing fee of 1000 BEE (about $373 at the time of writing; very reasonable compared to many other exchanges).
Here's how it works:
So you've got your favorite ERC20. You love it, you left your wife for it, you've got bags & bags of it, you just know it's gonna make you rich someday. But it's not trading on Hive Engine. Oh the horror!
No worries, instead of begging us to add it for trading, you can do it yourself. All you need to know is the token contract address, which you can find with Etherscan:
For example, I just added Polymath (POLY) myself:
https://etherscan.io/token/0x9992ec3cf6a55b00978cddf2b27bc6882d88d1ec
Once you know the token's contract address, all you need to do is send your 1000 BEE payment to the swap-eth account in a specially formatted transaction:
swap-eth1000ERC20 <contract address>Wait for the transaction to confirm and for the system to perform all the behind-the-scenes setup work. It could take anywhere from 2-5 minutes depending on how busy the system is.
You won't get any immediate visual feedback if the token listing was successful. To verify it, you can search for the new SWAP.xxxx pegged version of the ERC20 token.
In my case, I added Polymath (the token symbol on Ethereum is POLY, so on Engine it will be SWAP.POLY):
You'll notice the token symbol graphic is not automatically added (it's blank to begin with). For now, the Engine team will manually add the symbol to the token later on. Making this step automatic as well is something that still needs a bit more development work.
The new token should also be available in the ERC20 Tokens deposit & withdraw menus right away, on both Hive Engine and Tribaldex:
That's it, there is no step 4! Easy as pie, right?
There are a lot of moving pieces to automatic token listings. In most cases, if some error occurs halfway through the process, the system will refund your BEE listing fee and include an error message in the refund transaction memo. This could happen if you specify an invalid contract address, a contract address that doesn't conform to the ERC20 token standard, a token that has already been added to Hive Engine, etc.
In some rare error cases it might not be possible to automatically refund your BEE. If that happens, you can raise a support ticket and our helpful tech support staff will get things straightened out:
https://support.privex.io/open.php?topicId=27
We reserve the right to disable deposits & withdrawals on any user added ERC20 token at any time without warning, for any reason, including but not limited to scams, fraud, or otherwise abusive/shady token listings. No refunds of the BEE listing fee will be possible in these cases. Be advised that the Engine team will review all newly added tokens to make sure the listing is legitimate.
Now that we've got our Ethereum gateway completed, we intend to focus some attention on the popular Binance Smart Chain, which is essentially a copy of Ethereum with lower gas fees. So you can expect a BSC gateway coming soon which will function in much the same way as the Ethereum gateway. That will allow BNB and various BEP20 tokens to trade on Hive Engine.
Eventually, people might start using Hive Engine as a conversion service to move assets from one blockchain to another. Imagine a case where a particular token exists as both an ERC20 and a BEP20. You could deposit it to Hive Engine from BSC, then withdraw it on Ethereum, or vice versa.
I'm fairly excited about all the possibilities having both an Ethereum gateway and a BSC gateway will bring, and I hope you guys will be too! We're going to keep doing our best to make the Engine ecosystem awesome, with many more new features, smart contracts, and trading possibilities to come.
The future has never been brighter!
Image attribution: screen shots are my own, title image is by Peter Patel from Pixabay