Over the past few months, we have seen several peer-to-peer and decentralized exchange solutions announce their progress. It is good to see such creations, as most cryptocurrency trading still takes place on centralized platforms. QVolta is one of the latest P2P exchange platforms to come about, focusing on fiat and cryptocurrency. Another competitor for LocalBitcoins is emerging, which can only be considered to be a good thing.

QVolta Embraces P2P Trading

It is somewhat surprising to see so few decentralized or P2P exchange solutions in the year 2017. Considering we all deal with decentralized cryptocurrency, one would expect there to be a bigger focus on peer-to-peer trading in general. Instead, most users rely on centralized exchanges, which are subject to severe regulatory measures. It is evident something will need to change in this regard before cryptocurrency can be considered a mainstream trend.

QVolta is one of the few projects focusing on peer-to-peer trading as of right now. Although the platform itself still has yet to be finalized, there are some interesting aspects to look forward to. Most people will immediately notice that the platform aims to compete with LocalBitcoins, even though it is not solely focusing on Bitcoin right now. It appears users will also be able to trade Ethereum for fiat currencies on this platform. That is a good sign, mind you, as all cryptocurrencies must be tradable in a P2P or decentralized fashion.

Being able to buy and sell cryptocurrency in exchange for local payment options will bring Bitcoin and Ethereum to more people, which is a great thing. Although some solutions already exist in this regard, it will be interesting to see if Qvolta can one-up its competition. Converting cash to crypto and vice versa remains a big problem for a lot of people, even in 2017. The current process involving centralized exchanges is anything but convenient.

As one would expect these days, QVolta will host its own ICO in the very near future. While we are not big fans of every new exchange platform issuing its own ICO token these days, projects like these need adequate funding to be viable. It appears 18 million tokens will be created in the end, which means the team hopes to raise around 18,000 ETH during the crowdsale.  That’s a pretty ambitious goal, although it is not necessarily impossible to achieve by any means.

If all goes according to plan, a mobile application for this platform will be developed in a few months from now. A desktop client for the alpha version of this platform is already available, even though a lot of work still needs to be done to turn this into a proper exchange solution. It is good to see some work having been done well ahead of the ICO, as most other products expect people to throw money their way without even a minimally viable product.

For the time being, it remains to be seen how things will play out for QVolta. This new platform has a lot of promise moving forward, although it remains to be seen if it can compete with existing peer-to-peer solutions. More players entering this market can only be considered a good thing right now; that much is certain. All we need now is some more decentralized trading solutions, as that is what the cryptocurrency community really needs right now.