A new technology has been introduced and is now available on GitHub that enables trading between ethereum and bitcoin blockchains. This is the Ethereum version of atomic swap compatible for use with existing Bitcoin, Litecoin and Vertcoin as confirmed in the GitHub website.

Altcoin exchange claims that this is the first “atomic swap” that is happening within the two largest cryptocurrencies by current market value. This will increase the possibilities of a larger community of developers to be able to work around the code.

A trade has successfully been completed by Altcoin’s Exchange developer team where 0.12345 ether were traded for 0.1245 bitcoin. The idea for atomic transactions has been around since 2013 but it only seems now with the growing popularity of Bitcoin and Ethereum that the idea has put into place.

Whilst this might seem a bit daunting and complex to the average users, developers believe that this is another goal they must cross to achieve the centralizing of cryptocurrency exchanges. This would give ability to swap assets directly between the blockchains, Coindesk reports. At the moment developers can lock tokens in ethereum using its smart contract that specifies that the funds will only be sent if there is an equal amount of bitcoin to be received during a specific period of time. Once that is received, the exchange is complete. Due to the different values of the currencies in the monetary world

This technology is still in quite early stages. There are still security and practical reasons to why the atomic swaps might not be possible today. It was confirmed to Coindesk by the Altcoin Exchange CEO Andrew Gazdecki that the team set this up for testing purposes and the next step is believed to be the trade of bitcoin to ether for their US dollar amount value or another similar fiat currency.

Gazdecki admits that developers have quite a few limitations and problems to get through before this new type of trade is used in the cryptocurrency world. He believes, that this is a small step towards better trading in the future.

As he quoted through Coindesk:

“Decentralized trading is the next step forward in this industry”

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