The collaboration between the two cryptocurrencies will pave a path for cross-chain atomic swaps which is the most awaited development for the year.

Something big seems to be cooking currently in the crypto world and this time at the heart of this story is not any major cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Ripple, but altcoins Monero (XMR) and Litecoin (LTC). The heads of the two altcoins have recently met and what brews out from their meeting is that the two coins are all set for a potential merger.

Ricardo Spagni, the project lead of Monero and Litecoin founder Charlie Lee are likely looking for a collaboration. The talks about this started last Saturday when Spagni posted the following tweet from his official Twitter account with the handle Fluffypony. The tweet shows a picture of Spagni standing beside Charlie Lee while it hints of a potential merger between the two cryptocurrencies.

Such a productive few days, finally got to sit down with @SatoshiLite and talk about a possible merger between the Litecoin Enterprise Alliance and the Monero Enterprise Alliance, which we’d obviously call the LAMEA. #blessed #justblockchainthings pic.twitter.com/yIclMHH2ke — Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) January 27, 2018

Charlie Lee was quick enough to respond to Spagni’s tweet. In his own anonymous style of putting things, Charlie Lee jokingly suggested that even a greater merger between the cryptos could be made possible.

Although @fluffypony was kidding here, I think it would be good for Litecoin and Monero (2 of the top non-scam coins ?) to work together. A while back, I proposed to him that we work on making it easy for people to do on-chain atomic swaps of LTC and XMR in a decentralized way. https://t.co/idDn7Dmzf7 — Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 27, 2018

Charlie’s tweet hints towards one of the most important and highly sought after development in the world of cryptocurrencies, which is atomic swaps. Atomic swaps allow for two different cryptocurrencies to be exchanged instantly and in a secure manner, across two different blockchains.

After the implementation of Segregated Witness (SegWit) last year in May 2017, the atomic swaps were first tested on the Litecoin network. Later, in September 2017, when the Bitcoin blockchain network implemented SegWit, atomic swaps were being tested there as well. In the same month later, the first on-chain atomic swap between Litecoin and Bitcoin was performed successfully which set the stage for further development and was viewed as a greater adoption of the technology across the gamut of digital currencies.

In another series of tweets, Charlie quickly went out expressing his ambition of making Monero’s unique anonymity and fungibility compatible with Litecoin’s liquidity.

Of course, it will take some work for atomic swaps to work properly on Monero and it's up to Monero devs and community to decide if this is a good idea. If this happens, I think it's going to be huge, but no longer an unexpected surprise. ? — Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 27, 2018

However, this is not for the first time that Charlie Lee has approached other digital currency for a probable collaboration. Earlier, he reached out to Dogecoin thereby allowing two coins to be mined together.

Moreover, Charlie also went out suggesting potential benefits from the collaboration between Monero and Litecoin and having a swap network between the two. The collaboration could possibly give more fiat exchange opportunities for Monero and further allow a better secrecy for Litecoin.

As Litecoin is listed on a large number of fiat exchanges, this will allow more people to buy Monero via Litecoins. Additionally, it would also benefit Litecoin users to get access to Monero’s unique anonymity and fungibility. this could also potentially mean that Litecoin could be more cash like than it was ever.

This sounds like quite an exciting proposal for the heads of two altcoins, however, this would mean a great deal of work to be done by the Monero team in order to facilitate the atomic swap transactions. For this, the entire Monero community involving its developers should be convinced as this would mean some concrete changes to the code base wherein the project is likely to face some resistance.

However, this is quite indicative of the fact that cross-chain atomic swaps are here and it is only some time more where we could see them getting implemented on a broader scale.