As a few enterprising users noticed yesterday in our "pre-flight" check, BlockTrades has been working for the past few weeks on adding support for Monero, a well-known privacy coin. Monero was a reasonably challenging coin to support, because like a number of innovative coins (e.g. Steem) it has it's own unique communication protocol that isn't a simple copy of the bitcoin RPC protocol.

Today I am happy to announce that you can now buy and sell Monero on our site. Of particular interest to Steemians, we offer both Steem and SBD trading pairs for buying and selling Monero, in addition to many other Monero trading pairs.

What coins do you plan to add next?

We don't have immediate plans to add any specific new coins. We are extremely choosy about the coins we support, in part because we usually plan to hold a significant quantity of each coin to handle large purchase orders from customers. We also have to make sure we have reliable pricing sources for the coin, and this is generally more difficult to obtain for newly released coins.

Another important criterion is that we currently don't list any coins that we are concerned might potentially be classed by the US securities commission as a security, because some of our customers are located in the US. In the future, we are considering offering additional coins to non-US customers who are willing to provide proof of foreign residence.

As a very informal poll, if you are a non-US citizen/resident, please feel free to leave a comment if you would/would not be willing to provide proof of foreign residence in exchange for the ability to trade additional coin types on our site.

What else are we working on?

For the past month or so we've been working on a web-based system for filing support requests, which I hope we'll be releasing next month. Also, for the past couple of weeks we've been working on an "affiliates" feature that will allow web site operators to easily embed our quick-trade service directly into their site. Stay tuned for more details!