Morpher has announced the launch of their decentralized exchange, which will allow users to trade over 700 stocks, commodities currencies and other cryptos with no need for a counterparty. The platform, which will go live on August 1st, uses smart contracts to let anyone in the world stake cryptocurrency to the performance of an underlying market, making it tradeable through what the company calls “virtual futures.”
The startup’s CEO, Martin Froehler, said “billions of people in low and middle-income countries have been excluded from western capital markets either by regulations, by companies rejecting them as customers, or simply by steep initial capital requirements. We are changing that by making global capital markets available to anyone for the first time.”
Morpher DEX makes decentralized stock trading possible through smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts coded into the trading protocol on the blockchain. Users choose the market they would like to stake (e.g. Tesla stock) and select the amount that they would like to invest. The staked tokens “morph” into a virtual future, and are destroyed upon creation. When the virtual future is closed, tokens are minted proportionally to the current value of the virtual future, which is pegged to the performance of the underlying market.
Tim Draper, an early investor in Morpher, commented: “Free markets are awesome, and liquidity creates wealth. Morpher is creating infinite wealth!”.
Users are able to trade long or short any and all markets, employ up to 10x leverage, and place their trades 24/7 — even while the underlying markets are closed. Morpher DEX is the first step in true permission-less trading and decentralized access to global markets. The exchange will launch on August 1st, 2021, at www.Morpher.com/dex.
Morpher’s team has been developing its protocol and app since 2018 and launched a sidechain trading app in August 2020. Since then, Morpher has gained a following of 40,000 active traders and has several thousand daily transactions.