FOX. No, it’s not the American news channel -- it’s a new trading token by Shapeshift. Think of it like Shapeshift’s response to Binance’s BNB, or Bithumb Coin BN, or Hotbit’s HTB. Exchanges up and down the block are releasing their own coins -- each of them hoping for a piece of the exchange token frenzy. After all, if BNB could go from $1 to over $30 -- why can’t they? So -- what do we know...
FOX. No, it’s not the American news channel -- it’s a new trading token by Shapeshift. Think of it like Shapeshift’s response to Binance’s BNB, or Bithumb Coin BN, or Hotbit’s HTB. Exchanges up and down the block are releasing their own coins -- each of them hoping for a piece of the exchange token frenzy. After all, if BNB could go from $1 to over $30 -- why can’t they? So -- what do we know...
Basically, we're trying to get people away from custodial exchanges. This is an endemic problem in the crypto world that was a problem in 2011 when I first got involved and it’s still a problem. So, we realized that to solve that we had to provide all that stuff in one place. (Erik Voorhees)
ShapeShift released the token yesterday. It apparently works by enabling commission-free trading with a pretty neat bonus: zero fees between cryptocurrencies. If you sign up now you can get 100 FOX tokens automatically. They never expire. Instead, they provide $10 worth of free trading volume (per token) every 30 days. So that’s, what, $10/token x 100 FOX tokens = $1,000 worth of free trading volume every month. Not bad.
The CEO, Erik Voorhees, was quoted at an in-person interview the day before:
“We've obviously been thinking about doing a token ever since 2017 and we wanted to wade into it very slowly and carefully … We've been kind of evolving our concept of what our coin is going to be over the last two and a half years.”
ShapeShift’s FOX is an ERC-20 token. It’s classified as a “utility token.” ShapeShift minted a finite 1 billion FOX tokens. For now, they act as a type of coupon for trading discounts -- with more functions being added in the future.
“This has nothing to do with establishing a new chain,” Voorhees said about FOX. “Basically, we're trying to get people away from custodial exchanges. This is an endemic problem in the crypto world that was a problem in 2011 when I first got involved and it’s still a problem. So, we realized that to solve that we had to provide all that stuff in one place.”
Keep in mind that ShapeShift has a permissionless ideology behind their exchange -- and FOX keeps that going. BNB and similar exchange tokens enable value transfers between exchange coins. FOX, on the other hand, asks users to be their own self-custodial exchange all while offering more liquidity than other permissionless exchanges.
This new FOX token, coupled with the July debut of ShapeShift’s new platform, seems to be the team’s answer to Coinbase, Kraken, Bittrex, and other custodial exchanges currently dominating.
All this adds up to one goal: “We're hoping that this will help marginally move some people away from custodians and be more comfortable with the non-custodial model,” Voorhees said.
“ShapeShift’s goal,” Voorhees wrote in a blog post published Wednesday, “is to make self-custody a seamless and enjoyable experience, because this will help the world move toward self-sovereign finance, and away from fiat.”
If this interests you, you might be glad to hear that ShapeShift has more liquidity than any other self-custody option -- especially decentralized exchanges (DEXs) or swap services. But do keep in mind that KYC is still required to use the platform. So there are still pros and cons to using DEXs or other swap services offering anonymity.
