Swapping done right — Part I
Less than three months ago I launched my many-2-many NFT swapping platform swap.kiwi into the NFT orbit. NFTs worth more than 8.5M USD have been swapped so far. Although this is already an awesome milestone for the platform, there is still a long way ahead.
Swapping NFTs feels like a natural addition to the ongoin sales and auctions. People might not be happy with their mints or just want to swap their way up. But it has become a very dangerous endeavour to do an over-the-counter swap based on trust in an anonymous blockchain world.
Assume we live in Utopia, where all people are honest and can be trusted. Great, we can send our precious NFTs first and just await for the arrival of the agreed on assets. Well, we don’t live in this world. It feels like there is an NFT scam happening every other day with people who are doing an over the counter trade, sending in good faith their NFT and never receiving something in return.
I have personally been an escrow for many NFT and ETH swaps. Today, people still rely on trusted members of the community. And it is great to have such people which you’ve never met in your life but whom you trust your most precious assets with. But we reached a point in NFT time where we see tweets about someone being tricked into doing an over the counter swap and loosing one or several NFTs or other assets to scammers on a daily level (have a look what happened to houghey.eth).
Knowing whom to trust in the anonymous world of blockchains is quite hard. With an ever growing number of anonymous users it gets even harder. The quantity of existing NFTs and NFT projects is growing exponentially. Without a trusted escrow, swapping NFTs is doomed to fail or simply be impossible in the future.
Swap.kiwi tackles the issue of trust by providing a trusted service dapplication users can rely on. The idea of swap.kiwi is fairly simple. Swap your NFTs with others. You can do so by swapping NFTs for other NFTs or do NFTs+ETH for NFTs.
Let’s say Alice and Bob want to swap NFTs with each other:
Alice selects the NFTs in her wallet she wants to swap. She enters Bob’s wallet address and proposes the swap. Bob sees the content of Alice’s NFTs and adds his own NFTs. He accepts the swap. Alice sees now the swap content and can either reject or execute the swap.
Simple. Safe. Reliable.
Swap.kiwi also offers the possibility to verify contracts. Meaning those contracts get a green verification badge. This way, we are able to add a new level of security to the swap.
What other measures should you apply to avoid being scammed?
- Never share your seedphrase or enter it somewhere.
Important: The only time when you need to enter your seedphrase is when you get a new computer and install MetaMask from scratch or when you were resetting your computer and install MetaMask from scratch. - Never share your passwords
- Never store your seedphrase and password digitally
- Get a hardware wallet from Trezor or Ledger.
Important: Never buy over resellers. Buy directly on the manufacturer’s page. Set it up from scratch using the manufacturer instructions. Don’t use your existing Metamask to set up the new wallet. - Explore multisig options like Gnosis. Don’t know what multisig is? Read this.
- If you do a swap with someone known in the space, reach out to them through a different medium or ask the counterpart to DM on Twitter for example. As proof of verification.
- Triple check everything. Seriously. Do it.
- Revoke the NFT approval if no longer needed. Either by interacting directly with any contract (check out this awesome step-by-step guide we made for you 🙌) or just simply go to revoke.cash and revoke the approval via an interface.
