Announcing Nowswap: The 1st DEX focused on smaller trades

We are proud to announce the launch of Nowswap — a decentralized exchange protocol tailored for smaller (sub $3000) trades with drastically reduced transaction fees.

The idea for Nowswap emerged last year, when our developer, Jason, wondered why the transaction fee at Uniswap was set to 0.3% — and whether there were any alternatives that were more affordable.

After spending much of Q4 2020 diving into the design of all available DEXes, Jason built the first iteration of Nowswap. It was successful at providing a drastically lower transaction fee in low volatility pairs compared to leading decentralized exchanges. At 0.1%, it reduced the transaction fee to be exactly ⅓ of what it would have been on Uniswap. This first iteration was launched on Ethereum mainnet in January 2021.

The exploration went on. The second iteration deployed a pool-specific fee structure. Each liquidity pool can set its own fee through collective governance of developers, token holders, and liquidity providers. This setup provided flexibility, but sacrificed simplicity. Since governance is based on various stakeholders, we saw the potential of governance overhead and potential conflict of interest among stakeholders.

So, we improved it.

The third iteration of Nowswap reverted to a mathematical formula that dynamically sets the transaction fee as a function of trade size. While the transaction fee worked well, the algorithm often incurred high Ethereum gas costs due to a Solidity algorithm quirk around the Babylonian square-root algorithm (essentially, the algorithm makes an initial guess, improves the guess, and iterates until convergence). That loop generated heavy computational demand and thereby gas cost — So the team updated the algorithm to avoid the expensive Solidity loops, and brought the gas cost in line with leading platforms (i.e. Uniswap).

That brings us to today.

We have officially launched the Nowswap Public Beta, so go ahead and give it a try at app.nowswap.org.

This is just the beginning, and we are honored to share this journey with you.

-The Nowswap Team

P.S. looking to get involved? Join the Nowswap Discord channel (hyperlink: https://discord.com/invite/Y6KMCnU63G). We are looking for developers, community managers, designers and ecosystem contributors to join the team (reach us at contact@nowswap.org)