Openswap Makes In-Wallet BCH and BTC Atomic Swaps Possible

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developer Mark Lundeberg has revealed his new project, a fork of the Electron Cash wallet that performs trustless atomic swaps between BCH and BTC. On Dec. 18, Lundeberg officially launched the first iteration of his Openswap platform with a video tutorial on how to trade between two different cryptocurrencies.

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Openswap Version 0.1 Published — Swap BTC BCH Trustlessly

On Tuesday, the first version of the Openswap wallet was released to the general public. Speaking with news.Bitcoin.com, BCH developer Mark Lundeberg explained that Openswap version 0.1 was released for Windows and Linux operating systems. The developer also mentioned that an OSX build is on the way. Lundeberg has published a video demonstration showing a cross-cryptocurrency swap between both cryptocurrencies on Youtube. The programmer performed the trade himself using a BCH wallet called ‘Bob’ and BTC wallet named ‘Alice.’ The Bob wallet had an allocated amount of BCH, while the Alice client had some BTC in order to process the trade. In the video, Lundeberg showed how the two parties communicate with each other via an onchain private messaging feature.

The communication window shows an exchange of messages back and forth including both parties’ addresses and public keys. Behind the scenes of the conversation between Bob and Alice, the messages are using the BCH OP_Return function. The information is encrypted using a shared secret only Alice and Bob hold and at any time they can review the message history in order to resolve a dispute. When using the Openswap messaging feature, no one else is able to decrypt the messages transferred between Alice and Bob on the blockchain. In the message window, there is an “offer” button where the person can draft an offer and propose the trade to the other person in the private conversation.

Lundeberg demonstrates how Alice makes an offer for some BCH and the suggested trade is displayed in Bob’s message window. Now Bob can accept the proposal, but if he doesn’t like the price Alice submitted, he can send her a counter-offer. Lundeberg shows how Bob can simply edit the price of the trade and submit a counter-offer back to Alice, which will be displayed on her message window. Alice can also counter-offer again, ignore Bob’s offer, or accept it by clicking “accept,” which triggers the initiation of the atomic swap.

Alice Must Release the Secret to Bob in Order to Claim Her Funds

While in private conversation, the two parties have already exchanged enough smart contract information to perform the cross-cryptocurrency trade. Alice can then send her bitcoins to a specific smart contract address and Bob can abort the deal by not sending any funds into the smart contract, whereupon her funds would be refunded. But if Bob sends his agreed amount to the contract then Alice can redeem her BCH using the secret, but she has to reveal the secret to Bob, which in turn unlocks his BTC.

“I’ve been interested in atomic swaps ever since I got involved with cryptocurrency (especially BCH) back in February,” Lundeberg told news.Bitcoin.com. “I started [Openswap] back in September, and it was basically completed by the end of October — But with all the hard fork drama it got put on the back burner for a while.”

As far as adding other coins to Openswap, Lundeberg said he was going to be focusing on other projects for a while and won’t be adding any other coins right now. “But, pull requests from other developers are welcome,” the programmer stated. Lundeberg said that version 0.1 could be buggy, but he doesn’t think there will be any “money-losing bugs,” though still he believes it’s best to play safe with a small fraction of funds for now.

What do you think about Mark Lundeberg’s Openswap cross-cryptocurrency trading feature? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Images via Shutterstock, Youtube, and Pixabay.

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