In what is a major development for the communities of both Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency and Monero, the market’s leading privacy coin, COMIT Network, an open protocol facilitating “trustless” cross-blockchain applications has announced,
“peer-to-peer atomic swaps between Monero (XMR) and Bitcoin (BTC) are now available on mainnet.”
We put out a press release to celebrate the news!
“Monero <> Bitcoin Trustless Atomic Swaps Now Live on Mainnet” #monero #xmr #bitcoin #btc https://t.co/uvHcHRDwU5 https://t.co/gDDIzOA4jU
— Monero Space (@MoneroSpace) May 28, 2021
This release, version 0.7.0 of the XMR-BTC swap tool, is in accordance with the patch release on top of (version) 0.6.0 that defaults to mainnet when running a swap. The same has been expanded upon in-depth on Monero’s Reddit-based platform.
Advantages
According to COMIT, “the users now can trade XMR for BTC without any interruption from an intermediary or the trading counterparty, or even without using a regulated financial institution.”
What about atomic swaps then?
A detailed report was published as a part of the Monero Outreach newsletter to highlight the usefulness of the same. But, here’s a simple illustration,
Source: Blockgeeks
Few advantages that the same intend to solve include,
- Central exchanges are centralized and hence open to a host of attacks. Atomic swaps remove the need for having a 3rd party and make the trade as direct as possible
- Interoperability between the different assets is a huge problem right now in cryptocurrencies. Atomic swaps are going to bring users of all these different coins together to help them interact with each other
Here, it’s worth noting that this isn’t the only Monero-related development to make news of late.
The Farcaster project, for instance, raised 2727 XMR (worth $650,000 today) to build out a similar trustless atomic swaps implementation. Haveno, a Monero-focused fork of Bisq, is implementing atomic swaps for its XMR/BTC trading pair. Cross-chain bridges have also been announced for Secret Network and Thorchain, both of which will allow for easy trading with Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain tokens.
What’s more, other popular Bitcoin and Monero wallets too joined this party such as Samourai Wallet and Monerujo.
According to Justin Ehrenhofer, an organizer of Monero Space, the coin’s ongoing developments have had an impact on on-chain metrics too. He noted,
“Limited trading venues despite surging retail user demand for private and fungible money have created a strong demand for these decentralized exchanges. There are more than double as many average daily Monero transactions as there were a year ago.”
