Until now, BlockTrades has only offered an “instant exchange” service, similar to a currency exchange at a bank or at an airport. This form of exchange service is generally easier to use and less risky than a traditional exchange service that matches up price orders between it’s customers, because customer funds aren’t held at an instant exchange.

BlockTrades’ new trade-matching exchange service will support Hive trading

But with the announcement of Hive, we wanted to ensure that there would be at least one traditional trade-matching exchange service available at launch to support the coin. So for the past week or so we’ve had a team working to set up a new BlockTrades-branded exchange to allow trading Steem for Hive and other coins (BTC, LTC, etc).

I think the new exchange will be ready for launch by the time Hive itself launches, or very shortly thereafter. The trade-matching exchange service will be hosted on Bitshares, a decentralized, transparent, blockchain-based trading platform. More details on how to trade on the new exchange will be available soon.

Identity information required to use our trade-matching exchanged

Note that to trade on this new exchange, we will require customers to be provide identification info on our trading portal via their BlockTrades account there (we are required to do this by US regulations).

So if you want to be able able to trade Hive soon after it's listed, I recommend you send us your authorization request now, so that you'll be ready to go when trading commences. You can do this by going to the profile page of your BlockTrades account, then selecting "Authorization" from the Profile menu. However, if you've already previously provided identity info and been authorized, you do not need to do this step again.

After Hive launches, only our trade-matching exchange will support Steem tokens

We will of course maintain our existing "instant exchange" service, which will continue to function as normal, but going forward our "instant service" will only support Hive, not Steem.

So we will only be providing Steem trading services via the new trade-matching exchange.