Aphelion

Aphelion Review

Aphelion is a new decentralized exchange that launched in January 2019. It is powered on the NEO-blockchain. The team behind behind Aphelion argues that NEO, compared to Ethereum or Bitcoin, is more energy-efficient, more secure, more scalable and compatible with more development languages (thus fitting a higher percentage of the developers around the world). The main advantages are set out in this picture:

On 5 August 2019, the exchange announced that it now also supports Bitcoin. Through that, Aphelion became the first and only NEO-based wallet with “full BTC-integration”. This is naturally very impressive and shows that Aphelion is in the forefront technologywise.

According to information from Aphelion’s website, the exchange has a team consisting of 22 people. 3 of them being founders, 3 working in marketing, 6 developers and the remaining 10 advisors. There’s clear information on the website on who the team members are with links to their LinkedIn-profiles etc. This all does provide some extra level of comfort for a prospective user wondering whether the exchange is legitimate or not.

As this is a decentralized exchange, it is also open to citizens or residents from the United States. Or rather, the citizenship or residency is of less importance for decentralized exchanges seeing as they never hold their users’ assets.

General information on DEXs

DEXs are becoming increasingly more popular, mostly due to the following factors:

• They do not require a third party to store your funds, instead, you are always directly in control of your coins and you conduct transactions directly with whoever wants to buy or sell your coins.
• They normally do not require you to give out personal information. This makes it possible to create an account and right away be able to start trading.
• Their servers spread out across the globe leading to a lower risk of server downtime.
• They are essentially immune to hacker attacks.

However, DEXs normally have an order book with lower liquidity than their centralized counterparts. The disadvantage of a lower liquidity is true also for Aphelion. On the date of first writing this review, 3 July 2019, Aphelion’s 24 hour trading volume was 407 USD according to Coinmarketcap. Not 407,000 USD, but 407 USD. On the date of last updating this review (16 March 2020, right in the middle of the crisis with COVID-19), neither Coinmarketcap nor CoinGecko had any information on the 24 hour trading volume. This is not a good sign for this platform.

How Does It Work?

When you go into the nitty-gritty details of exactly how a decentralized exchange works, it becomes quite complex. However, the Aphelion-team has produced this picture which makes it a little more comprehensible (still a bit difficult though):

Aphelion Trading View

Different exchanges have different trading views. And there is no “this overview is the best”-view. You should yourself determine which trading view that suits you the best. What the views normally have in common is that they all show the order book or at least part of the order book, a price chart of the chosen cryptocurrency and order history. They normally also have buy and sell-boxes. Before you choose an exchange, try to have a look at the trading view so that you can ascertain that it feels right to you. The below is a picture of the trading view at Aphelion (from the desktop web wallet version):

Aphelion Fees

Aphelion Trading fees

The one thing we can’t stress enough is that you must always ascertain the trading fees at any exchange you are interested in. Every trade occurs between two parties: the maker, whose order exists on the order book prior to the trade, and the taker, who places the order that matches (or “takes”) the maker’s order. Makers make the liquidity in a market and takers remove this liquidity by matching makers’ orders with their own.

The global industry average taker fee has for a long time been 0.25% of the value of the order. Today, we see a shift towards even lower industry averages. Many new exchanges now charge 0.15% or 0.10% instead.

At Aphelion, takers pay 0.07% and makers pay nothing at all. This fee offering is very competitive.

Aphelion Withdrawal fees

Another fee to consider before choosing which exchange to trade at is the withdrawal fee. The withdrawal fee is usually fixed (regardless of the amount of cryptocurrency units withdrawn), and varies from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency. The global industry average withdrawal fee is 0.000812 BTC when you withdraw BTC.

Here, at Aphelion, you pay no withdrawal fees at all. This is very impressive indeed and there’s only 30 something exchanges in the whole world that offer zero-fee withdrawals. Most of them are decentralized exchanges.

All in all, the fees at Aphelion are very competitive.

Deposit Methods

Aphelion does not – like all (or at least close to all) other decentralized exchanges – accept any deposits of fiat currency. This means that cryptocurrency investors without any previous holding of cryptocurrency assets can’t trade at this trading platform.

In order to purchase your first cryptocurrencies, you need a so called entry-level exchange, which is an exchange accepting deposits of fiat currency. Find one by using our Exchange Finder!

Aphelion Security

The servers of DEXs spread out all across the globe. This is different from centralized exchanges that normally have their servers more concentrated. This spread-out of servers leads to a lower risk of server downtime and also means that DEXs are virtually immune to attacks. This is because if you take out one of the servers, it has little to no impact on the full network of servers. However, if you manage to get into a server at a centralized exchange, you can do a lot more harm.

Also, if you make a trade at a DEX, the exchange itself never touches your assets. Accordingly, even if a hacker would somehow be able to hack the exchange (in spite of the above), the hacker can not access your assets. If you make a trade at a centralized exchange, however, you normally hold assets at that exchange until you withdraw them to your private wallet. A centralized exchange can therefore be hacked and your funds held at such exchange can be stolen. This is not the case with respect to decentralized exchanges.