Discovering DCRDEX Markets page

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Just a quick reminder for all those new to DCRDEX:

• Back up your Decrediton wallet seed and your DCRDEX seed before starting to use both. If you don’t, you could be at risk of losing all of your coins. Backup, check, and storing in a safe place, will save you from problems further down the line.
• Also, whilst trading, the DCRDEX window must be open until your trade is fully settled.

Market page overview

Let’s explore the market page interface. Top left are the markets and pairs. For this example, we’ll stick with the DCR/BTC pair as it has the most liquidity. Next to this, we have our depth chart, which shows all the orders stacked on top of each other. This shows the quantity you can buy or sell at a certain price point. For instance, the closer you get to the spread bar, the lower the volume of orders. The spread bar is placed dead centre from the closest buy and sell orders. The spread percentage gives you an indication of how close together the nearest orders are. It’s not uncommon for this to between 0.5% – 3%. But obviously the closer these orders are, the more active the market will be.

This chart can also be changed to a candlestick chart, which shows how the market has been performing. Each bar demonstrates the movement of the market over a period of time, for example, if you set the time frame to 24hrs, each candlestick represents one 24hr period. The candlestick shows the lows, highs, and averages for that period.

Next we have the grey bar which represents the order area, left is the buy orders and right are the sell orders. In the middle, we can change how we want to process our trades. A limit order lets you choose the price you want to buy or sell your coins at. The market order buys or sells the closest orders in the list, until your order is filled.

Clicking on the “limit order” button we get a panel for our trade, a similar panel can be found when we click on the “market order” button. The first thing we have to decide is whether we want to buy or sell DCR. For this example, we’ll buy DCR, after clicking on the “Buy DCR” button we can set up our trade.

Setting up the trade

When buying DCR, we’re looking for the lowest, best price. If we look to the left under “buy orders”, we see everyone else, that’s trying to buy DCR. You can decide to go higher, lower, or the same. If you click on any of these orders, the price box autofills, adding your bid to that price point. In the depth chart, there’s a dotted green line showing where your order will be placed. If you'd like too, you can also enter a value. As a quick note, the closer you are to the spread line, the quicker your order will get filler. In the past, I’ve entered a value that’s the same as the spread amount, and it got filled almost instantly.

You can also check this value on DCRDATA’s markets page to see what the bids look like on other exchanges. It’s interesting to note that some participants will fill your order and place them directly on another exchange if there is a big enough arbitrage opportunity. It makes complete sense to check this data before placing your order.

Once we’ve entered our price, we then need to enter our lot size, 1, 2, 3 etc… Under the “lot” box, it tells you how much BTC you need to fill the order. Remember, you’ll need a little more for the on-chain mining fees. I tend to keep a balance of 0.0008 BTC and 0.1 DCR to cover this.

What are lots?

The next question you should have, is what are lots? For example, if you want to buy 80 DCR, it will fill 40 DCR from the first buy order and 40 DCR from the next order in the list. DCRDEX simplifies the buying and selling process by having lot sizes, currently 1 lot = 40 dcr. Whether you are buying or selling, your order must contain full lots. For example: I want to buy 40 DCR for 0.0013 BTC each, in-order to fill one lot, I require 0.0013 × 40 which equals 0.052 BTC. If I wanted more than 40 DCR, I would need to fill another lot. For this order, I would need, 0.104 BTC for 80 DCR. This system helps prevent miss matches and makes it easier for orders on both sides of the trade to be filled.

Completing the trade

After this, press, the “Place order to buy DCR” button to register your trade on the order book. On the next page you’ll be asked to confirm your order, check this carefully. Then enter your password and hit the “Buy DCR” button. Don’t worry too much about the box below at this point, as the defaults are adequate for now.

Hopefully, that’s given you some insight into the DCRDEX trading process. We’ll do more on the markets page in the future, but I think the next step is to complete a trade and show you guys the process in action, which we’ll be doing in the next article.