Swap (XWP): The most fundamentals driven cryptocurrency yet?

A fast, fair, efficient, peer-reviewed, privacy-oriented CN + C29s hybrid monster with a stable & secure blockchain.

The recent years have witnessed a huge boom in crypto projects, each one with its objectives and philosophies. But if you look closer, a majority of these projects usually focus more on the gimmicks, and less so on fundamentals.

Ever since the OG Bitcoin, there hasn’t been many projects that have stuck to the idea of building a robust, pure cryptocurrency with a fundamentally strong blockchain. Projects these days are usually more into selling attractive roadmaps and sometimes even making unrealistic promises.

The investors are partly to blame for this, who are usually looking out for the gimmicks in crypto projects. Cryptocurrency is the usual stuff. What else do you bring to the table?

Monero is one of the few projects which, while focusing on pure cryptocurrency, took the concept of privacy coin to a whole new level. In recent years, Grin is another noteworthy privacy-oriented coin, with strong fundamentals.

But all of these projects I mentioned above have issues of their own. The Bitcoin network is a slow monster, Monero’s PoW algorithm arguably has decentralization issues, and Grin is largely unstable, experimental, and not so user-friendly (mostly due to the bleeding edge nature of project development).

But out in this wilderness, Swap is one project that has caught my attention for specific reasons. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that I’m quite excited about the project.

Here, I’d like to discuss a few points about Swap that, to me, make it stand out from the rest.

The Origin

Swap started as a joke at the Haven protocol, which charged a certain “governance fee”. But eventually, this ideology of creating a free and fair cryptocurrency slowly took shape, gained traction within the community, and turned into a serious project.

FreeHaven was born on November 16, 2018, with “faster 15-second block time, no premine, no fees, and no BS”.

On December 11, 2018, the community decided to rebrand FreeHaven as Swap. It also moved away from Haven to the Monero codebase, hence introducing bulletproof transactions. Swap could now take advantage of the Monero community for enhancements and bug fixes. It would be relatively easy to implement Monero’s good bits into Swap while keeping the not-so-good bits out.

Later on, in February 20, 2019, Swap forked to Cuckaroo29s Cycle PoW, becoming the first CryptoNote coin to integrate Cuckaroo for fair mining; incidentally also providing the Swap blockchain with better stability and security. Thus, Swap became the world’s first CryptoNote + Cuckaroo29s hybrid monster.

A fundamentally strong cryptocurrency

Swap takes its fundamental-focused approach to the next level, creating the best example of what an ideal cryptocurrency should be all about.

Fair

Swap has no governance or developer fee, no premine, and no ICO, ensuring that the distribution of coins is free and fair. Even Bitcoin had allegedly been premined, and has a significant amount (~980K BTC) lying in an unknown state. Swap, however, has a miners’ fee in transactions, to help incentivize miners to keep the network running.

Swap ditched CryptoNight in favor of C29s Cycle PoW algorithm, as it’s stable, peer-reviewed, and more fair to miners. Monero’s PoW algorithm is somewhat rigged to keep profitability up for those designing it. For a little more insight on the matter, you can refer to another Medium piece titled “CryptoNight is Poison”.

Usually, in PoW networks, individual miners often tend to join the bigger mining pools, as they have greater hash rates, and hence more probability of getting rewarded. This causes an unintentional sort-of centralized mining scenario, where big pools get bigger, while smaller pools eventually leave, as they rarely get rewarded. Also, this can eventually result in one pool having enough hash power to launch a 51% attack, which then introduces an unwanted trust factor.

Swap is the only CN coin that supports Solo Pools / MicroPools on Windows and other platforms, with a simple one-click installer. Not even Monero could do this so far.

With Swap MicroPool one-click installer, individual miners can easily set up and run their pools. And due to the 15-second block time, there are 5,760 blocks mined per day, so even a single mining rig with decent hardware can find a fair share of blocks every day. Thus, miners are encouraged to establish independent MicroPools, rather than joining other bigger pools, somewhat keeping the network as decentralized as possible.

So far, Swap is the only CN to have pure JavaScript-based pools.

Fast and power-efficient

Swap’s mining algorithm is power-efficient. The nonce does not require a Merkle Tree recalculation, thus pools require very little CPU. Validating shares on the Swap blockchain requires next to no CPU load, while verifying a CN share takes a lot of power.

Due to such an improved rate of validation, Swap can achieve a 15-second block time without compromising on the issues that would appear on a different PoW blockchain. The 15-second block time also has other advantages that don’t appear on the surface but yield an extremely smooth-running network. For instance, transactions are lighting fast, and are usually confirmed within two and a half minutes.

Swap is always looking for ways like these, to improve the speed and efficiency of the network, while also keeping it fundamentally strong. Another good example of this is the fact that Swap plans to move to an ASIC-friendly Cuckoo algorithm in the future when the time is right.

ASIC hardware is more efficient and optimizes electricity consumption. However, there’s currently an unfair distribution of ASIC hardware in the market, as the majority of it is manufactured by a single vendor. This leaves the door open for potential backdoors and compromises the network security. But in the future, when ASIC mining technology is cost-effective, and multiple vendors are entering the market, its distribution should become fair.

Privacy-oriented (Untraceable)

“Right to privacy” is a never-ending debate. On the one hand, we have individuals who believe that privacy is a choice, and they have the right to decide who they want to share specific information with. On the other hand, some governments would like to convince their citizens that sacrificing personal privacy is essential for providing better security.

Nevertheless, in many countries, the general outlook towards cryptocurrencies is not that great. For example, the Indian Government is considering a bill that could essentially penalize individuals for being involved in just about any cryptocurrency-related transaction.

In such a landscape, the drive for adoption of privacy-centric cryptocurrencies should ideally be in high demand. Swap uses CryptoNote, which is a stable, reliable and peer-reviewed, privacy-oriented application layer protocol for decentralized cryptocurrencies.

Swap transactions are untraceable, hence individuals using Swap aren’t bound by the government, or any third-party for that matter.

Stable and secure

Swap’s privacy protocol is arguably one of the most stable privacy protocols implemented to date. CryptoNote is well-tested and peer-reviewed. There is another significant alternative protocol called MimbleWimble, popularly used by Grin. But, that protocol is largely experimental and unstable at the moment. Additionally, Swap uses a stable & peer-reviewed PoW algorithm, as well.

Swap’s network hash rate has seen a steady increase over the last few months and continues to grow even today. The increase in hash power will strengthen the network and eventually make it more secure.

Swap Emission Graph

Swap also has a controlled emission rate. It has a total supply of 18.4 million with tail emission kicking off after 8 years since the genesis block. During the tail emission phase, the block reward will be constant at 0.075 XWP. At this rate, there will be 157,680 coins mined each year. This ensures that Swap is inflation-resistant in the long run.

User-friendly

If you have transacted Grin outside of exchanges, you might have realized the importance of user-friendliness! 😜

The Swap community is actively developing various tools to make the experience with Swap as seamless as possible, both for users as well as for miners.

For users, there are wallet apps for every platform, with mobile wallets coming soon. There’s even a light web wallet for people who prefer to keep it minimal. They’ve also created a Ledger app that works with all variants of the hardware wallet.

For miners, as mentioned before, Swap has easy-to-setup MicroPool software for solo mining, especially with a one-click installer for Windows.

A few more Swap tidbits

The Swap codebase is clean and reader-friendly, making it easy to understand and audit. The entire Swap codebase (CryptoNote + C29s) has been peer-reviewed.

Swap has encrypted transactions from its genesis block.

Swap’s block time is 8X faster than that of Monero.

Swap plans to introduce atomic swaps to Bitcoin with Lightning Network in the near future. This will enable easy swaps to Bitcoin, Litecoin and any other coin on the Lightning Network as well.

The Team

Like any other good project, all that I’ve said about Swap above matters especially because they have a great, enthusiastic community working towards its development.

The core team members come from different backgrounds, but they all share the interest in blockchain and associated technologies, and more importantly, the vision for a robust and fair cryptocurrency. Swap was born out of their shared frustration about the fact that their vision was possible, yet no one else seemed to care enough about it.

At the heart of the Swap project is Sebastian “Seb” Green. He has a long history with crypto and his experience has helped him to understand the inner workings of various blockchain models. Seb started with Bitcoin mining in 2011 on two AMD GPUs, earning 5 BTC per week.

Since 2017, he has created and maintained a bunch of mining pools for Monero-type coins (Bittube, Graft, Electroneum, etc.), some of which have even been endorsed by the project communities. Notably, he runs most of the pools with no pool fee under the CryptoKnight branding.

His intent here is to “learn the differences in their approaches and to understand Monero’s internals and its flaws”. He does it out of sheer passion, and certainly not just to make profits.

Seb’s experience helps him to easily spot flaws or issues in other crypto projects. And he is quite straight forward and vocal about making the community aware of them. Sometimes, he has gone so far as to launch pre-informed attacks (keeping safety measures in place) on some of the crypto projects, just to prove that the flaws exist.

Seb might be well-known among people who closely follow cryptocurrencies, especially within the CN communities, but there’s another side to Seb that many might not be familiar with.

Apart from crypto, he’s also worked in various other hardware, software and firmware projects. Look no further than his GitHub if you want to know more about his other fields of expertise. In 2013, he created an autopilot system called Murdock, for RC planes, and published the design and firmware on GitHub, making it available for free.