This is awesome!

We now have 3 bridges all operating in different niches: Shapeshift, exchange.BTSBOTS and metaexchange. I think all of these services will converge and begin competing over time, offering the same kind of full-range bridge services, and I assume will all begin to offer shapeshift-style API for easy integration with other products and services. It will be fantastic if we can have these 3 services all competing and fully integrated in our wallets as the tools that allows bitshares to use bitcoin as its rails to deliver an optimal and seamless user experience. With many competing services in this vital area users can choose the service that is offering the best spread and will benefit immensely.

Be careful to watch if there are already buy orders at the feed price if you try to short to yourself! If you're unlucky you can have your shorts snatched up immediately buy orders already on the books.

I just put up a short order for 1 bitgold, so if anyone had this happen to them they can buy from my short order and either cover their short, or invest the amount with us (if you want to stay 100% exposed to BTS but still want the CFS sharedrop and small return from CFSGOLD).

ha? why would I use a service for exchange when I can do the exchange in the market myself?
What's the use-case here?

This is factually really big. I had been hoping someone would make something like this, as it's a vital piece of infrastructure.

The light wallet cannot trade on the DEX. With a bridge like this then all light wallets have access to easy trading with market orders. Once the system has proven reliable I think the best of these services should be incorporated directly in the GUI of the light wallets. Over time a rating system and alert system can be put in to reduce risk, but at first our focus should be the immediate UX benefit this service has over using the DEX directly for casual traders.

No new features in the blockchain!!!!

The things listed here is all we need:
https://github.com/BitShares/bitshares/milestones

All other resources beyond this should be focusing on UX. Unless UX is perfect then NO MORE FEATURES!

The new site is very nice, well structured and very nice designs so 

However, what I expected to see was a website with moving backgrounds like ripple so this disappointed me a bit. I guess these things are more costly but I think that the future of banking should have moving backgrounds.

Come on, everyone uses those moving backgrounds. They're just temporarily a fad because html5 video is new fancy tech. A distracting image on the front page isn't good, the call to action button needs to be the focal point.

It's so awesome. We now have probably the most professional looking branding on our main site, and the best, most user friendly funnel as well. Click get started, look at some explanatory pictures, download the light wallet, start trading bitcoin to BTS, BitUSD, BitCNY directly in your wallets with shapeshift and similar services, perhaps soon also BitGold, Bitsilver, BitOIL, BitEUR. Then once you're experienced with the system and interface of our wallet, you can download the full node and start doing fully decentralized trading with all the assets you are used to, plus UIA's, and at lower spreads. And of course at all times you can instantly cash in or out through the most mature decentralized financial infrastructure, bitcoin, to services like coinbase, bitcoin accepting prepaid debit cards, bitpay and coinbase merchants. It's like BitShares leaps completely past all the issues earlier altcoins have had with adoption/network effect.

Dear friends,

For the past few weeks Riverhead and I have been working off the trading bot system that Toast developed to create an economic framework for large scale BitAsset/bitcoin market making. The result is Cryptohedge, a DAC that uses BitShares UIA's to raise funds for market making operations from the BitShares and bitcoin community in the form of low risk, steady reward investment instruments called CFSassets.

The idea is simple: We sell a CFSasset for each of the BitAssets that we do bitcoin market making for, and then our bots use these funds for high-volume market making while automatically hedging all exposure they have to bitcoin in order to minimize risk. This ensures that there is no volatility risk and the spread our bots take can thus be set very low, driving more volume to the BitAsset markets they operate in. Our first CFSasset, CFSGOLD, will initially be set for sale at the price of 1 BitGold per CFSGOLD, giving it a NAV of 1. Over time as the bots generate income from the spread this NAV will increase, but our hedging system is meant to ensure that it will not be able to decrease since all trades will be done at a 1 to 2% spread and gold exposure will always be close to 100%. Funders will be rewarded through the mechanism described in the CFSGOLD prospectus linked below.

Pooling our funds this way will enable our community to work together to produce the same kind of massive buy and sell walls that nubits has used to gain their huge volume over the past several months. The main difference is that our volume is actually done with a sound, collateralized asset, and we've also decided to focus on gold at first, since this is an asset that is not currently represented on any bitcoin exchanges and will be highly sought after if it can be made liquid, since almost everyone who's into bitcoin also loves gold. Because gold hedging is a valuable service that many exchanges will understand their clients demand, it's likely that we can negotiate highly favorable market making discounts if we can accomodate gold hedging at high volume. This is another advantage of pooling our funds for market making.

Currently there are still no exchanges that have implemented bitgold/BTC and our first offering of CFSGOLD is just a small amount (10 CFSGOLD sold for 1 BitGold each)to test the funding system and allow us to put up walls the second an exchange integrates BitGold. Our goal will then be to get every exchange that currently supports a BTS trading pair to also implement BitGold/BTC and BitUSD/BTC. We will then use the BitGold volume that we create on these altcoin exchanges to incentivize larger bitcoin exchanges to integrate BitGold.

It's about time that bitshares starts getting the attention it deserves, and we are going to force bitassets into the spotlight by making them the most highly traded cryptocurrency token second to bitcoin, through large amounts of capital, the tightest possible spread, and sheer force of will as we approach every single exchange in existence and makes sure they know why they NEED to implement bitasset trading pairs in order to stay competetive in the business.

Moy Hau is our exchange relations guy, he has worked for several chinese exchanges and has personal connections to the management at several top chinese exchanges and has already seen positive interest from huobi and ANX regarding the demand for bitcoin to gold hedging. We haven't actually pitched our service to the big players yet because we want it to be established with high volume on the altcoin exchanges first, but our medium term goal is to see bitgold traded for bitcoin on the largest bitcoin exchanges, next to CNY and USD.

You can see our HedgeBot in action market making BTC/BitUSD on bter here: https://bter.com/trade/btc_bitusd The volume is relatively low because of competition by nubits, but the spread we offer is similar to theirs.

To learn more about Cryptohedge you can read the business case:

CFS business case

To learn more about CFSGOLD, its withdrawal system and its early funder perks, read the prospectus:

CFSGOLD prospectus

To see our exchange pitch check out our exchange integration reference document:

High volume bitcoin to gold hedging

If you want to become a CFS funder and help make BitAsset liquidity explode while earning a steady return with low risk, then you can buy CFSGOLD right now directly from the decentralized exchange (unless it has sold out). The open sell orders can be found by searching for CFSGOLD:bitGOLD on the "market" page in the GUI.

Since the BitGold market still isn't liquid, the only way you can obtain bitgold at this point is by shorting it to yourself. It's a bit difficult to do, but doesn't put you at any risk and your total exposure to bitshares and gold remains the same (since you both short and go long gold). To do it, you have to go into the market page, find bitgold:BTS and then click on the SHORT tab. Here you have to check the box that says "short mode", and once you've done that you need to specify the quantity you want to short while putting price limit and interest rate to 0. Then you execute the order like a normal order, and will see it show up on the books. As soon as the order shows up on the order book, you go to the BUY tab and click on the new short order that you just created in order to have the client automatically fill out the buy information so you can buy into your own order. Once you've done this you will have bought your own short, and will now posses the amount of bitgold you shorted while having 3x that amount worth of BTS tied up as collateral. Your total exposure to BTS remains the same as before, and your exposure to gold will stay at 0 as long as you keep your bitgold, or use it to buy into CFSGOLD. We will do full buybacks with all our bitgold every week in the beginning of our operations (as described in the CFSGOLD prospectus), so you will always be able to get your bitgold back in time to cover your own short. If you need any assistance with covering your short I will always be happy to help and will make sure no one gets a forced cover after the 30 day time limit runs out.

Yes it would be great.

The main concern would be the centralized factor.
Shapeshift just takes any coin and sells them on centralized exchanges.
So there's a double trust factor, both shapeshift and the exchanges they use for selling the coins.

On another side note, they might have just solved something another problem for us.
We've wanted shopping cart plugins, for a long time.
The shifty button does exactly that.
https://shapeshift.io/tools.html
However the same concern as above can be applied to this shopping cart.

This isn't a real issue. When they don't actually hold your money the counterparty risk is miniscule. At 0.1% fees and a 1 hour window where they can steal before everyone are alerted (with automation in the wallet this could become minutes) they will only be able to steal 1 months revenue but lose their entire business as a result. So it will never be profitable for them to steal. Because the service won't depend much on branding if its put directly in the wallet, competition will be mostly on fees and reliability. So we will see cutting edge competition and a really low barrier to entry if shapeshift and other incumbents aren't staying on their toes at all times to provide the best possible service.

Getting shapeshift and a framework to allow future bridges directly in the wallet is the most important thing we need right now. Its the single thing that would bring the most value because it would make our wallets attractive to bitcoin users who are tired of volatility but dont want to deal directly with altcoins.