How to Trade DUST on Alcor.exchange

6 min readMar 26, 2022

Alcor.exchange is an all in one DEX, which stands for Decentralized Exchange. The purpose of the site is to allow users to trade one type of crypto currency for another. Crypto Currencies can also be referred to as tokens. In this article we will be focusing on the WAX token and the DUST token. Click here to open Alcor. The first thing you will need to do is to change from the default EOS DEX (another type of blockchain) to WAX. See the image below.

Choose “WAX Mainnet” from the dropdown menu

Next, you will want to connect your wallet to Alcor by clicking on “Connect Wallet”. Most users will be using a WAX Cloud Wallet, but you can also connect via one of the other six methods as well. There is also an option to create a brand new WAX Cloud Wallet or Anchor Wallet if this is your very first time using the WAX Blockchain.

Click on the type of wallet you will be logging in with

Alcor offers two types of trades — Swap and Market. Each has it’s own “bucket” of tokens and oftentimes one has a better rate than the other for the same token. In this case you would do a comparison of the two and determine which will yield you the best deal. But there are times when you have to use the Swap instead of the Market. For example, new tokens are often only available on the Swap side.

Here is how you would compare the price difference between a Swap trade and a Market trade.

Click on “Swap” at the top left of the page.
Type in 1 as the WAX amount you want to swap (to get a price comparison). If you are going to make the trade, enter in the actual amount of WAX you want to swap.
Choose the token you want to swap your WAX for (in this example we are using DUST). The system will automatically calculate the current rate for the amount of WAX you entered. In the image above you can see that 1 WAX will get you 140.5861 DUST. If you look above the graph you will see the exact exchange rate being offered at the time of your trade. Here you can see that 1 WAX = 141.0486 DUST and conversely 1 DUST = .00708975.

Now lets look at the exchange rate for the same trade on the Market side.

Click on “Market” at the top left of the page.
Type “DUST” in the filter by type box.
Click on “Market trade”
Look at the lowest Market offer (in red on the left side of the screen). Remember red is called the “ask” = sellers and green is called the “bid” = buyers. As you can see, the lowest ask being offered as a Market trade is 0.013333 WAX for 1 DUST. This means that at the moment, you would get a better rate by performing a Swap trade rather than a Market trade. We know this because in the steps above we determined that 1 DUST = .00708975 WAX.
If you determined that a Market trade is a better deal than a Swap trade, you would enter in the amount of WAX you want to trade here. Looking at the image above, you can see that 13,581.136 DUST is available for sale at 0.013333 WAX each and the total cost to buy all of it is 181.07728628. There is no minimum for trades on Alcor so you could enter 0.1 WAX or 1,000 WAX and the trade will be executed.

When you are performing a Market trade, you are buying or selling at the best rate available from what is being offered by those that have set up Limit trades. For example, if you wanted to buy 15,000 DUST and you did it as a Market trade, you would pay 0.013333 WAX per DUST for the first 13,581.136 DUST tokens and 0.01398 WAX for the remaining 1,418.864 DUST tokens. This is because that is what is available to buy from the market at the moment. You can see this by looking at the list of asks in red in the images above and below.

If you want to set up your own Limit trade you can do that by following the steps below. A limit trade is where you input the amount you are willing to buy (bid) or sell (ask) a token at and then wait to see if someone will agree to make that trade. In this situation, your token would actually be taken out of your wallet and transferred to Alcor’s wallet so that if the trade happens, it will be automatic. You can cancel your limit trade at any time and your tokens would be returned to your wallet with no cost or penalty.

Here is how you would set up a Limit trade to buy DUST tokens.

Click on “Limit Trade”.
Type in the amount of DUST you would like to buy.
Type in the amount of WAX you are willing to pay for 1 DUST token.
Click on “Buy DUST”.
Once you approve the transaction, your Limit trade will show up here as an Open order and also in the list above (in the green section). If no one has taken your trade and you want to cancel, click the red “Cancel All Orders” tab.

In the example above, we set the Limit trade to buy 1 DUST token at the price of 0.0075 WAX per token. If you look at the list on the left side, you will see that the most anyone is offering to buy at currently is 0.0071 WAX. Our Limit trade would therefore be placed above that buy offer because we offered more than that. Think of a limit trade as a queue. There are a line of people wanting to sell tokens (the list in red) and another line of people wanting to buy tokens (the list in green). If there are more buyers than sellers, the price of the token will rise. If there are more sellers than buyers, the price of the token will fall.

Hopefully this article has helped shed some light on the world of DEX trading. To read all our articles, be sure to follow us here, on Twitter, an on Telegram.