will that be fully functional upon release?
David got some skills:)
Yes he does !
Yes, Halo is complete decentralized exchange without a "middle" coin like nxt. Its totally cross platform. The microtrader is called "NightTrader" and essentially is my gift to Blakcoin(since it will have exclusive BC pairs). However, i can see people trading bitbay once it pegs in the microtrader to hedge out of bitcoin.
Also, staking is possible, but only in BlackHalo. The new daemon however, has this bizarre RPC bug where python-bitcoinrpc causes timeouts and crashes only in blackcoind built for windows. I'm still trying to diagnose it. rat4 sent me like 7 builds to fix it and gave up to no avail. Need to identify if its because of a change in blackcoin or that simply the old rpc library is incompatible with the new build.
The method of Staking in BlackHalo is called "cold staking" or "multisignature staking" where you basically use two computers or locations to stake making your wallet unhackable. You will see what im talking about in this version of Halo because you can basically do the same thing with regular purchases. (You can send coins from one location and have it automatically signed at another using 2 step spend). In this version I automated that task.