[Messari AMA] Don Mosites, Co-Founder of AirSwap and Rob Paone, Growth at AirSwap

Messari hosted a public AMA with AirSwap's co-founder Don Mosites and growth lead Rob Paone in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.

Messari: Don and Rob, thanks so much for joining the group to field some questions about AirSwap. We have a great queue of questions! I'm excited to start, thanks for being here.

Rob Paone: Thanks for having us.

Don Mosites: Thanks, great to be here.

Messari: Before we dive into some more specific questions from our group, @dmosites can you give us a quick breakdown of your background pre-AirSwap and the motivation behind building AirSwap? Out of everything one could build in this space, why AirSwap?

Mosites: Sounds good, thanks. My background is in early stage tech, by trade as a software engineer and product designer. In 2016 when I was taking a look at new opportunities, I caught up with Michael Oved who I went to school with and he happened to be exploring new opportunities too. With the emergence of Ethereum and smart contract capabilities, I began to visualize some of the new applications of the technology, and with Oved's experience in trading looking into the challenges of DEX made a lot of sense.

It was soon after that tokenization began to click and the possibilities of transacting peer-to-peer without intermediaries at a global scale became really exciting.

Messari: I see, that makes a lot of sense. On the note of peer-to-peer transactions, for anyone who might not know, Rob can you give a quick ELI5 of AirSwap?

Paone: AirSwap is a peer to peer trading network, powered by the Swap protocol

Messari: We have a couple questions in the queue about some new DEXes and other trading protocols. First one, for Don: “What do you think of Binance DEX? Are they a competitor?” And, although not a DEX, a question about Arwen: “What do you think of Arwen?”

Mosites: Binance DEX is interesting, but outside of the Ethereum ecosystem where we think the real activity is around tokenization and developer community.

Paone: Arwen is interesting and I view it as more competitive to what Binance DEX is doing, than to what AirSwap is building. Both Binance DEX and Arwen are primarily non-custodial trading solutions, not full-fledged DEX. The move towards non-custodial as a whole is a win-win for the industry though, and it's a direction we firmly believe.

Messari: Can you elaborate on this a bit in light of the ecosystem seeing more and more protocols try to compete with Ethereum's tokenization value prop?

Mosites: Ethereum definitely has competition and we feel that's a net positive, but it is still leading the pack. Ultimately, AirSwap follows tokenization, and as new networks emerge we'll certainly consider supporting them.

Messari: Rob, this is a bit of an extension of your ELI5 answer, but: “What makes AirSwap different from other DEXes?”

Paone: AirSwap is different for a number of reasons. For starters, with AirSwap there are no orderbooks. The trading happens stricly on a peer to peer basis. AirSwap only leverages the Ethereum blockchain for trade settlement, and peer discovery happens off-chain. The reason this is important and different, is because the concept of off-chain discovery and on-chain settlement reduces the issues that many DEXs face with front-running.

Messari: Relatedly, here's a question on OTC trading. How does it work? Have you seen much success here?

Mosites: OTC is a natural fit for AirSwap, because in the end its peer-to-peer. AirSwap Spaces is an OTC trading product that basically functions as an automated escrow. We've seen some very large trades across the network, many by professional trading desks who can make these trades with confidence because there is no counterparty risk. We're working on updates to our OTC product that'll make this style of trading even easier.

Messari: We have a couple questions about regulatory concerns for AirSwap (and DEXes in general). First: “Is AirSwap (and other DEXes) facing any new regulatory concerns?” And: “Are you worried about regulation and KYC requirements?”

Mosites: We've reviewed our design with external counsel and are comfortable with the way the system works. If any of these conditions change we will likewise review and assess any possible impact.

Messari: Can you talk about the utility of AST briefly with regard to this question: “I haven’t bought any AST before, but if I did what benefits do I have as a token holder?”

Mosites: Holding the token gives you the ability to announce your intent to trade on the network as a maker: the party that sets the price of a trade.

Messari: Here's a pair of questions on general adoption of DEXes (and DeFi in general). How does AirSwap think about improving the process of on-boarding new users to crypto? First: “DEX adoption has been slow overall. How has your growth compared to what you expected when you started the project?” And: “How can we make DeFi less intimidating to non-crypto users or make it easier to on-board new users to crypto?”

Paone: Making cryptocurrency (and DeFi by extension) less intimidating for non-crypto native users is still a challenge, and something I personally don't think the industry has totally figured out yet. At AirSwap, we strive to make the user interface and experience as simple/easy to use as possible. One area that’s traditionally been a barrier to entry has been the on and off-ramps, but through integrations with new wallets like Portis (Fortmatic is another company to watch for here as well) which allows users to utilize Ethereum dApps with an email and password, we think we’ll help bridge the gap.

Messari: A couple more questions before we conclude. First: “I remember reading something about AirSwap and tokenizing real estate but haven’t heard any updates. Is that still happening?”

Mosites: As for DEX adoption, the transition from centralized to decentralized exchange is challenged by the fact that an order book is by nature a high performance, centralized construct. That’s why we started with peer-to-peer as truly decentralized trading, and we think that while overall adoption of DEX is still developing, the style of trading on AirSwap has made for pretty good volume comparatively.

As for tokenization, the AirSwap team is also behind the Factora framework, which has been used to bring multiple real-estate deals online as tokenized securities.

Messari: Awesome! Thanks so much, Don and Rob. This has been super informative. Before I open up messaging abilities again, what are the best ways to continue these conversations and keep up with everything the AirSwap team is building?

Paone: The AirSwap Telegram channel is usually quite active on general discussions. And if you're a developer/trader looking to build on AirSwap, I recommend you join the AirSwap Devs channel for technical conversations.