We are pleased to announce that Bitcoin wallets are now available within our funds management tools.

Nash users can now manage even more digital assets in one safe place, with our platform offering a fast, convenient solution for portfolios spread across multiple blockchains. Our tools are non-custodial and leave users in full control.

If you don’t already have Nash account, follow our guide and get set up in a minute!

The addition of Bitcoin wallets is just the start of our long-term plan to support the network.

Over the coming weeks, we will complete integration with our fiat partners to allow Bitcoin purchases using national currencies in supported regions. All Bitcoin bought through our partners will be transferred directly to users’ personal wallets, rather than a custodial account, as with any other asset supported by our platform. This will offer Nash users a more secure method of buying Bitcoin than centralized exchanges – and at competitive prices.

Even more exciting, though further in the future, is Bitcoin trading on the Nash Exchange.

Nash will continue to innovate so as to offer Bitcoin trading without compromising on performance and security. No one has yet achieved the full integration of Bitcoin into a performant non-custodial exchange. We are working on a protocol that will allow Bitcoin to be traded through our matching engine in a non-custodial fashion, offering the same performance as our ETH and NEO markets.

With the first stage of Bitcoin integration complete, implementing this groundbreaking protocol is the highest priority of our blockchain engineering team.

The principal difficulty of integrating Bitcoin into a non-custodial exchange is its lack of smart contracts. Bitcoin does, however, offer more simple hashed time-locked contracts (HTLCs) and other scripting primitives, which form the basis of the Lightning Network, a state channel solution for Bitcoin allowing faster asset transfers.

Our trading protocol uses similar primitives to the Lightning Network. Our goal is to avoid the custodial step involved in “token wrapping”, the most common method by which decentralized exchanges support cross-chain Bitcoin trading. One example is the wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC) ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain that corresponds to Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. Real Bitcoin is held by a custodian outside of the wBTC smart contract while users trade only wBTC.

What is more, our high-performance, off-chain matching engine will offer speed, liquidity and functionality similar to trading Bitcoin on a centralized platform. This is simply not possible using atomic swaps, the other non-custodial solution employed by some projects. You can read more about the shortcomings of these approaches here.

Bitcoin trading on Nash will represent a truly revolutionary breakthrough. We will keep you updated in our quarterly reports, which will now be conducted online with the participation of our community.

By offering native support for the most popular cryptocurrency, Nash will prove that non-custodial exchanges offer a real and superior alternative to centralized platforms.

You can stay up to date with Nash by following our Twitter and Instagram. We also encourage all Nash Exchange token (NEX) holders to join our community platform, where they can talk directly with the team and receive reliable answers to questions.