Hello, after a while I decided to write something about etherdelta and a little guide how to use it, because I saw many people around me had problem to buy their favorite token there, before it reached some more famous exchanges.
Etherdelta? What is it?
Lets start with brief description. Etherdelta is decentralized exchange, where you can buy or sell Ethereum tokens for Ehereum. Ok, but why is that good? The main advantage is that it i decentralized, you do not need to provide any personal information to verify yourself and you can start trading immediately. It is driven by smart contract which is responsible for transactions like deposits, withdrawals or trades. (what is smart contract is quite well described here but now, we can understand it as executable decentralized application on the Ethereum, so it is safe in the way that algorithm will not be changed by someone outside.
Note: It should be impossible to inject some bad code into smart contract to steal your money, but of course, then there are threats as was The DAO hack, where the contract was written with elementary mistake, or as happened a few days ago, that interface was "hijacked", in the meaning of the domain of etherdelta and hackers tried to get your private keys with phishing , but with hardware wallets you are still safe). This is just part of explanation about smart contract. I am not trying to scare you to use the decentralized exchange, I use that very often. And they already fixed the problem. But it is good from time to time to follow their official twitter account about news. You should be careful in any case, if you use decentralized or centralized exchange.
In the case of etherdelta you need to have only Ethereum wallet to import it, or let it create some for you (empty one of course :) ) there and start trading. And that might be problem for newcomers, who are not much familiar with crypto and tried to jump in during the rise in last days. There are few options how to get the wallet, i.e. hardware wallets as Nano-S or Trezor (which I would recommend to you, if you want to have your funds safe), Mist wallet, MEW, other online wallets, etc. But lets start with something what we can use now, without waiting on shipping or synchronizing with blockchain. And it is MyEtherWallet. If you are familiar with MEW, you can skip to the EtherDelta trading section.
MyEtherWallet(MEW)
This wallet is very popular, you do not need to download whole block chain to be able to send transactions and you still have your private keys under your control. Which is safer than let your fund lie on the exchange, because you are the one who control your coins/tokens (just for your information there were famous hacks like Mt.Gox, BTC-e, Bitfinex and others, or popular exchange Bittrex froze funds of their clients till they finish their verification).
So if you have your Ethers on exchange as Bittrex, Binance, Bitfinex, Coindesk or what ever, you need to withdraw your coins to your wallet, before you will go to trade on etherdelta. For that case you need to generate new wallet, and it is pretty easy with MyEtherWallet. Lets make it together.
At first, go to the MEW website (be careful, this service is favorite target of phishing attacks, be sure that the url is exactly: https://myetherwallet.com, there were cases that Google showed as addverts sites like myetherewalIet.com where one of L in wallet was capital i or 1 - number one, or different ending like .org etc, it is highly recommended to bookmark the site within your browser) and choose the option "New Wallet"
Then choose your password for that wallet, it would be better to choose something more safe than I did ("my-secure-password" does not sound too safe :D) and then click on blue button Create New Wallet. Now we will get into the step two, which looks like this:
As you can see, there are not many option how to get lost here. You need to make a backup of your wallet, so just click on the "Download Keystore File (UTC /JSON )" which download the backup (you can use that later for importing this file into wallet as Mist, etc. but for now, just be sure you stored this backup). And then click on the red button "I understand. Continue."
Now we can see our private key which allows you to make transactions, import wallet, etc. We can use of course even the JSON file with backup, but we can do it even with this private key. You should never share this key with anyone, and keep it secure. You can also print a paper wallet if you want (info about your address -public key and private key).
Congrats, you have a new Ethereum wallet, we can now check if we stored info about our wallet correctly by clicking on "View Wallet Info" or "Send Ether & Tokens". "View Wallet Info" will unlock and show you info as balance, private key etc. "Send Ether & Tokens" will allow you to send tokens or ethers i.e. to your friends or to some exchange for trading, lets have a look on the this option just to finish a little intro into MEW.
So, we have now many options how to unlock our wallet for transaction. We can use hardware wallet, some applications, or if we followed only approach described here, we can use JSON file with backup (in that case we will need the password from the first step to unlock the wallet for transaction) or we can use our private key. If we choose to use our private key, we can paste it into the field "Paste/Type Your Private Key" and unlock the wallet by clicking on the button "Unlock" as you can see on the next picture
Note: And as you can see, MEW supports Ethereum -ETH and even Ethereum Classic - ETC (Ethereum fork after The Dao hack). If you want to store ETH, be sure you chose right network (should be set on the first step) from the drop down menu signed with green arrow on previous picture. In my case, I forgot to change it to ETH and it is set to ETC, so this wallet will be valid on for ETC. Be sure you are on the right network and do not send your ETH to ETC addresses or vice versa, you might loose your coins!
Sending is easy, you need to fill destination address ("To Address" field ) and amount ("Amount to Send" field ) you would like to send. There is drop down menu to choose if you would like to send Ethers or you can send tokens. You can let gas limit as it is and generate transaction, then you will need to confirm that transaction and transaction is sent.
During hyped ICOs (such as was Bancor, Tezos, etc) or CryptoKitties mania the network might be overloaded and you would need to set higher fee for your transaction. You can do it by setting a gas price in right upper corner as it is shown on previous picture.
And yes, you can store there tokens (many different ERC-20 tokens - which means Ethereum tokens) and Ethers. Everything together, but I think it is better to have more wallets and not storing everything at one place, but it is up to you if you would like to have everything on one place, why not. Well, that was small intro into MEW, lets get back to etherdelta exchnage.
Etherdelta
If you followed steps described in previous section, you should have your wallet prepared for trading. And of course there should be some funds, too :) Or you can let etherdelta to create wallet for you and you can deposit there some funds. So the first step after coming to etherdelta is to create or import your account/wallet there. Import might be done via hardware wallets, or in the same approach as it was for MEW when we tried to unlock our wallet. When you have already prepared wallet you can import it there. I would recommend to import created wallet there (that is is why there i previous section about MEW), but it is up to you. Picture shows us how ether delta looks like and the menu where we can choose what wallet we would like to use
If we choose import the wallet we will need to fill our address and private key there. It is because with that wallet we will deposit funds into ether delta and we want to let it allow it to store our funds there. For the filling your wallets info, you should see following form
or if you choose option to let etherdelta create the wallet for you, you should see something like this, but with info about your new wallet of course
Ok, now the funny part starts. You are logged into the exchange with your wallet, but if you have funds in your wallet, you are not able to trade yet, you need to deposit some funds on etherdelta. So you will need to create transaction on Ethereum network for that which means you will pay some fee. That means you need to have some Etheres in your wallet to be able to pay that fee. Sounds complicated? Lets have a look on the picture
I says we have no ETH nor tokens in the wallet, so we need to deposit something there. For example we bought some ETH on Binance and we withdrawed them onto our wallet, then wen the transaction will be confirmed we will see something like this
Now there are Ethers in your wallet, but they are not on etherdelta. So need to enter amount of ETH you want to deposit. But! There is on but, and it is that you need to left some ethers for paying the fee for transactions. In our case we have 0.205 ETH in the wallet. If we want to buy some tokens, we need to transfer (deposit on ether delta) some amount, for example 0.15 ETH, fee from that transaction will be paid from our wallet. That is ok, right?
We need to wait till the transaction will be confirmed. Again there might be some issues with gas for transactions like it was described in MEW section so if transaction will be pending for longer time, you can try to change the gas price. From the menu where we were setting our wallet by clicking on Gas Price
And then set the gas price for higher value, i.e.
Then you can try to deposit some amount again, but be careful it will take a fee again, not much (well it depends how you set the gas price), but it will. After transaction will be confirmed (will have enough confirmations on Ethereum network) we can start buying/selling.
When we successfully deposited some amount we can go to trade. There is no limit orders, like if you create an order it will not be paired with best matching orders, but it will create the new one. Be careful about that, it can cause that there will occur same orders in order book many times or even higher bids price than asks. It works as list of orders, not as usual order book. So, if you want to buy some amount, you should click directly on the order and set amount you want to buy. How to do that, in the case you want to buy from exiting order, click on the lowest red record in the order book (if you want to sell on the highest green order) as shown here
than you will see confirmation form, where you can change amount of tokens you want to buy and you will see final value which will be paid for that
You can confirm that order by clicking on the button "Buy" ( or "Sell" in the case you want to sell some tokens). This transaction has some fee too, and again it is paid from your wallet, not from your deposited funds. Remember that or if you will have no Ethers to pay fee in your wallet you will need to deposit some into your wallet to be able to trade again or to withdraw your funds (tokens or ethers) from your wallet.
Some times it might happen that orders are not valid and were taken by someone else but order book was not refreshed. you an just refresh the page (usually it is enough to press F5) and try it again. If you do not want to trade right now, you can place your order into order book and wait if some one will take it, you just need to fill parameters of the order as shown on the picture
in that case we set we want to buy 1000 AION with rate 0.001 and total price 10 ETH and this order will be valid for 10000 blocks. How long does one block take? It is not fixed value right now it is around 30s but you can find current values here on etherscan.io .
If you will decide to withdraw your funds or transfer them into another wallet it is i the same way as was the deposit. But remember to have enough Ethers in your wallet to cover all fees. And why is it so complicated with fees? Blame the smart contract of ether delta, you need to pay fee to send orders to it. But when you get familiar with that, it is not much confusing. It is a little price for enjoying decentralized exchange with no restrictions. I hope this article will help you to understand how it works and maybe help you to make some trades if you are interested in it. And you liked this article, you can tip me with some shit tokens here 0x86ECE8664dF9bFd428498912443d9dE27C791Ecd :D
And let me wish you Merry Christmas and happy new year with cryptos ;)