Is StellarPort Decentralized Exchange no longer a DEX?

StellarPort is a decentralized exchange that allows users to trade many assets directly from their Stellar wallet. Some of these assets include Stellar tokens which were freely tradeable on exchange – until now. The exchange has silently rolled out an update that marks a lot of these assets as either scam or unknown asset. 

Stellarport favoring some projects over others

We were approached by the BTCF team who shared some of the details with us. Their token is one of the affected one and while BTCF is still tradable on Stellarport, it is marked as “unknown asset”. 

To make an asset “known”, Andy from BTCF team dropped Stellarport an email. This is what they were told to do.

1. Pay the Stellarport.io team 20,000 XLM to carry out a research on their project.

2. Do KYC of the team involved with the project.

Many older assets have not been affected by this. It is on whim of Stellarport to decide which asset (read “token”) is a “known” asset.

Stellarport needs 20,000 XLM to give your token a “Known” status

If you are not so lucky, like the hundreds of tokens being run on a so-called “Decentralized exchange”, you must fork out 20,000 XLM which is around $1100 at the time of writing of this article, to pay Stellarport for doing additional research. After that, you will be asked to fill a form. This research includes verification of accuracy of information you on the form.

Keep in mind that there is still no guarantee that you will get the “known asset” status. 

So much for being a decentralized exchange. 

Stellarport now has three categories

1. Known assets – These assets have either paid 20,000 XLM to stellarport or have been presumed to be “known assets”.

2. Unknown assets – this is where you will find all the assets who have refused to pay Stellarport 20,000 XLM. These are NOT scam projects. A lot of good projects may simply want to save that much money to pay a proper exchange or simply use it for other purposes. This also includes known assets. 

3. Scam market – This includes assets that have reported as scams. It also includes unverified assets, unknown and known assets. Be very careful of the assets included here.

Fatal mistake?

Stellarport’s traffic and trading volume has gone down considerably over the past few months. Total trading volume is under 5BTC at the moment and aforementioned decisions certainly won’t help increase the traffic. A lot of fast growing projects have taken a hit because Stellarport has categorized them as unknown assets. We believe this will only force users to leave the exchanges al-together since they won’t be able to find the tokens easily. 

For instance, if you type in DRA or BTCF in the search bar, you won’t find either of them. To make them appear in search result, you must select, “unknown asset” radio button.

It is interesting to note that a lot of so-called decentralized exchanges ask for hefty amount of money to list the tokens. This includes some Ethereum-based exchanges like Token.store and Bancor network that ask for money to list tokens. So, it could be that Stellarport is looking to raise money to support its developers.