What do you do in the stock market when you have a big order but don’t want to spook the market? You trade it in a dark pool.
Dark pools are private forums for off-exchange trading. They’re used so institutional investors can make large trades without showing their hand to the rest of the market.
Republic Protocol is creating a dark pool for cryptocurrencies.
Based in Singapore, the Republic Protocol is a decentralized dark pool for trustless cross-chain atomic trading of Ether, ERC20 tokens and Bitcoin pairs.
It facilitates cross-chain atomic trades on a hidden order book over the ETH and BTC networks.
This solves the problem of big players impacting the market just by showing an order. With the Republic Protocol large block orders can be executed with minimal price slippage.
There’s a total of 1 billion REN tokens and Republic distributed 60.2% in the token sale which completed in early February.
The guy behind Republic is 21-year-old CEO Taiyang Zhang. He believes cryptocurrency dark pools could capture some of the $9 billion in cryptocurrency traded monthly. Dark pools have been successful in stock markets, where $270 billion traded in dark pools in 2017.
REN, an ERC20 token, isn’t on any major exchanges yet. You can find it on IDEX, Liqui, and Tidex.
Republic Protocol plans on having a testnet out in the second quarter of 2018. Mainnet launch is targeted for the third quarter.
What do you think, does cryptocurrency need dark pools and the Republic Protocol?
For more on cryptos follow me 
and trade cryptos on Binance