How the Cancoin Marketplace works

The Cancoin Marketplace provides the tools necessary for secure, direct Peer-to-Peer (P2P) bitcoins exchanges. Cancoin aims to provide a very high level of functionality and individual security & privacy for our users.

The Cancoin Marketplace was created as an alternative to ‘traditional’ bitcoin exchanges that require intrusive personal details and cumbersome deposit / withdrawal times by providing the tools necessary for secure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) bitcoins exchanges.

We hope to achieve this by leveraging our Multi-signature bitcoin wallets which have been successfully signing transactions on Ledger HSMs since June 2015, as well as a host of other functionality built on some of the most secure, trusted technologies available.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P)

The Cancoin Marketplace is a Peer-to-Peer bitcoin exchange. This means that when you buy or sell bitcoins you are doing so directly with other users of the Marketplace. You make payments directly to your exchange partner, with your preferred payment option, and receive bitcoins directly to your Cancoin multi-signature wallet. In order to decide who to buy or sell to, every user also has a public profile page that displays past order feedback, order history, online status, an overall rating and more, allowing you to use your own judgement before making an order.

Price Engine

The price of every listing in the Marketplace, whether it is a buy or sell listing, is run by the Cancoin Price Engine. The Price Engine is a turing complete scripting environment that allows you to write full, multi-line Lua scripts that control your listing’s buy or sell price. Use any of 4000+ bitcoin market price variables that are autofilled and updated every second from the bitcoinaverage.com API in your scripts. The price history graph that is shown below your price script executes in real-time and shows you what your price would have been historically.

If this ‘Price Engine stuff’ goes over your head, don’t worry because you can also just add a simple margin to your listing price instead of writing a script.

You can try out the price engine today on our public scripting sandbox by clicking here.

Multi-signature escrow

At the heart of every order made in the Marketplace is a unique, multi-signature bitcoin wallet that is used to hold the order’s bitcoins in secure escrow during the exchange. The escrow wallet is a 2 of 3 multi-signature (P2SH) bitcoin wallet, which requires two signatures to send bitcoins. The buyer and seller’s private keys work as signatures, as does Cancoin’s HSM (Hardware Secure Module) protected key. No single key will unlock escrow held bitcoins, ensuring their security during the exchange, and deposits originating from Cancoin wallets are green addressed. All deposits to escrow wallets are confirmed on the Blockchain, and you can use third party block explorers to verify escrow balances.


For more information on Cancoin Multi-signature bitcoin wallets, click here.

OpenPGP encrypted order chat

During orders on the Marketplace, you are buying and selling bitcoins directly with other users around the world, with a wide variety of payment types. Because of this, buyers and sellers require a way to securely exchange private payment information during trades. Every order made in the Marketplace includes an OpenPGP encrypted chat window, so you can send sensitive details to your trading partner without worrying. Your OpenPGP keys are generated during signup and encrypted using your 12-word mnemonic, so only you and your trading partner have access to your decrypted chat logs *.

For more information on OpenPGP order chat click here.

* If an order enters into the arbitration state, the entirety of the order’s chat log gets decrypted for Cancoin support members to view and respond to. You can also decrypt single chat messages and alert Cancoin support by including @cancoin in the body of the message you enter.

AES-256 encrypted file upload

Users will also have to exchange images and files proving payment during buy and sell orders. For this, each order has a file upload area that uses AES-256 CTR streaming file encryption, protecting shared documents over the wire and while they are on Cancoin servers.

Transparent fees

All orders in the Marketplace include a 0.75% service fee that is paid for by the seller. Buyers never pay a fee when buying bitcoins. Fee totals are visible at all times during orders and verifiable on the blockchain.