Illiquid Market Tutorial — How to buy or sell any ERC20 token with no liquidity

illiquid.market is a peer to peer token trading dapp for Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain and Avalanche. Built on the same open source codebase as OpenSea (Wyvern), Illiquid is a highly secure and trustless way to trade tokens OTC with no central counterparty.

This can be great for situations where you are unable to trade a specific token on a DEX like Uniswap or a centralized exchange — either due to a lack of liquidity, high fees, transaction failure or front-running bots.

When trading on Illiquid, tokens never leave your wallet until the moment a trade is executed. The code has been audited by Solidified and others. Wyvern has been used for over $20 Billion dollars of transaction volume on OpenSea.

How it works

Think of illiquid.market as a big list of orders to buy and sell tokens that anyone can browse or add to.

You simply tell Illiquid the address of the token you’re trading, the amount you want to buy or sell, the price and currency you’d like to trade for (eg. USDC, ETH, BNB…).

You then get a URL you can share with anyone, and your order appears in the order book on the Illiquid website. Anyone in the network can then come along and take your offer (provided they possess the tokens you want to receive).

In this example, any user with 400 USDC can submit a transaction that atomic swaps their 400 USDC tokens for your 2,000,000 PHCR tokens. They cover the gas and cannot compromise or drain your wallet in any way.

How to browse offers

This tutorial assumes you’re an experienced web3 user and are familiar with web wallets like Metamask.

There are two ways to browse offers on Illiquid. The first is by browsing the popular listings on the homepage at illiquid.market.

Tap a ‘View’ button to view all offers for any token on a particular network

Alternatively, you can paste the address of any ERC20 token in existence into the field on the homepage, hit Enter and it will show you all live offers for that token on Illiquid.

If your token isn’t recognised, double check that you’re on the correct network (Ethereum, Polygon, Avax etc.).

Once you’ve selected a token, you‘ll be taken to the Token page, from here you can view all buy and sell orders for that token.

Orders are separated into Buy and Sell tabs, they can be sorted by price, size or expiry date. Let’s take the example above:

Buy orders are where other users have PHCR tokens available to buy, and you can purchase them instantly using USDC or another currency.

Sell orders are where other users that want PHCR are willing to pay you in USDC or another currency in exchange for a set amount of PHCR.

How to fill an existing buy or sell order

1. If there’s an offer you want to take, tap the the Buy or Sell button to open up the Offer view.

Important: ensure that the token you’ll be receiving is an authentic token and not a counterfeit. Click on the blue 0x… address link to check the authenticity of the smart contract address on Etherscan.

2. Check the exchange rate, token addresses and quantities for the trade.

3. Ensure your wallet is connected, and that you are on the correct network. You may be asked to complete a signature to sign in, this does not cost you any gas fees.

4. Tap the green Accept Trade Offer button

5. The first time you trade, you’ll be asked to confirm a “Register Proxy” transaction — this costs about the same amount of gas as a single Uniswap trade, and ensures cheaper gas fees for all future trades. You only have to do this the first time you use Illiquid on each network.

6. Next you’ll submit an “allow” transaction for the token you’ll be spending. eg. if you are selling 2,000,000 PHCR for 400 USDC, you’ll need to allow Illiquid to access that 2,000,000 PHCR.

7. Finally, submit the transaction to make this swap, this will instantly atomic swap the tokens in your wallet for those in the buyer/seller’s wallet,
eg. you’ll receive 400 USDC (less a 0.25% fee) and the other party receives your 2,000,000 PHCR.

8. You’re all done! Your wallet balance should now reflect the change.

How to create a new buy or sell order

You can create an order to buy or sell any token in existence, even if it’s not listed on the Illiquid homepage. Start by deciding what you want to buy or sell, and what price you’d like.

Remember, the order will be shown publicly, but your trade won’t execute until someones else accepts your offer.

In this example, let’s imagine we’re trying to sell 30,000 Lockness tokens for 20 USDC on BNB Chain.

1. Ensure you’ve connected your wallet to the correct network

2. If your token isn’t already on the homepage, you’ll need to get the token address. You can get this from the project’s website or a site like Coingecko.

If the coin exists on multiple chains, ensure you copy the address for the chain you’d like to trade on.

3. You can then paste that token address into the homepage

Paste the address and hit Enter

After hitting Enter, you should see a screen like this

4. Great, your token is recognized, now you can create an order. Tap the blue “Create New Buy or Sell Order” button.

5. Now it’s time to enter the terms of your trade.

The token on the left is what you’ll send, the token on the right is what you’ll receive.

6. Enter 30,000 LKN into the You’ll send field

7. On the You’ll receive field, BUSD is selected by default, let’s select USDC by clicking on the dropdown

Click on ‘BUSD’

You can paste any token address as your receive token, but Illiquid suggests some common options like USDC and WBNB that you can select with a click.

8. Enter 20 USDC into the You’ll receive field

9. Select an expiry and tap the green Create Trade Offer button.

You can manually cancel offers at any time for a small gas fee, but setting an expiry means they will cancel themselves for free after a set period of time (if not accepted by another trader)

10. The first time you trade, you’ll be asked to confirm a “Register Proxy” transaction — this costs about the same amount of gas as a single Uniswap/Pancakeswap trade, and ensures cheaper gas fees for all future trades. You only have to do this the first time you use Illiquid on each network.

11. Next, you’ll be asked to Allow token spend. Confirm this transaction in Metamask.

12. Now, sign the order to add it to the Illiquid order books. This is a free and gasless transaction.

13. After a few moments, the order will be created and a sharable URL will be generated. You can share this link in Telegram, Discord, or with anyone you wish to trade with.

14. You’re all done! 🎉 Now anyone on Illiquid can view and take your offer. If you change your mind, you can delete the offer at any time.

That’s everything you need to trade on Illiquid. Illiquid is an immutable, secure and decentralized protocol built by the team at Unvest. Join us on Telegram for the latest announcements and updates.