Highlighting the Role of SwapperD in Ren

What is SwapperD?

SwapperD (Swapper + ‘Daemon’ {D} = SwapperD) is a wallet designed by Ren specifically for the execution of cross-chain atomic swaps. It serves as a general purpose tool for any exchange to be able to integrate and facilitate trade settlement via trustless atomic swaps.

SwapperD daemon wallet pop-up

RenEx, the first decentralized dark pool built on Ren, uses SwapperD as its settlement layer. This allows RenEx to settle trades between Bitcoin to Ether and Ethereum based assets, while having the capability to support other chains as well.

Exchange Settlement — why we chose atomic swaps?

From the outset, our aim has always been to build a platform that can facilitate cross-chain swaps and leverage the abundant value that exists outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. Some of the most interesting technology and projects reside on different chains, and for maximum liquidity to be captured, there needs to be a way for traders to easily transfer value between these different chains.

Currently the most widely used methods of exchange are either centralized or decentralized smart-contract based settlement. The drawbacks of centralized exchanges is that the exchange holds custody of the funds and is essentially a large honeypot subject to hacks and funds being lost. Decentralized exchanges do not suffer from these drawbacks, but the vast majority of DEX implementations use Ethereum smart contracts to settle, limiting the available trading pairs to ETH and ETH based tokens only.

For this reason Ren uses atomic swaps to settle all trades on RenEx. This gives us the greatest availability of tokens while not compromising on security, thanks to the trustless nature of the swaps.

While we do support other approaches to cross-chain capability, such as the WBTC initiative, these methods are still in their early stages, with further experimentation to be done compared to atomic swaps. SwapperD provides a reliable and agile tool which serves as a core infrastructure piece for RenEx, complementing the upcoming privacy and interoperable functionality that will soon be native to Ren.

What is an Atomic Swap?

An atomic swap is a swap where the both sides of a trade are executed in full, or not at all. In the context of a cross-chain atomic swap, the process relies on hash time-locked contracts, which all smart contract capable blockchains can support, as well as most UTXO model chains like Bitcoin. The cross-chain swap process is best explained with the lock-box analogy of Alice and Bob trading BTC/LTC explained here.

The best part of SwapperD is that we have abstracted away the complexities of the cross-chain swapping process. This is why SwapperD is built as a daemon, as it will continuously run in the background executing your trade (instead of a browser extension for example, that would stop the trade execution process each time you close the browser). This provides users with a smooth experience that is similar to other wallets, such as MetaMask.

Using SwapperD with RenEx

Upon navigating to RenEx you will be prompted to download and install SwapperD onto your machine. Windows, MacOS and Linux are all supported.

Or download here: https://github.com/renproject/swapperd-desktop/releases

After downloading and installing SwapperD for the first time, open and begin the setup. You will be prompted to setup a username, password and then record your seed phrase.

Create an account

Make sure to safely backup both your password and seed mnemonic. You will need both should you need to restore your wallet. The wallet will force you to verify you have backed up the mnemonic.

Mnemonic phrase backup

Once completed, SwapperD is ready for use. Deposit funds into your SwapperD addresses and you are then ready to use RenEx (as long as you have a KYC account already setup).

Upon initiating a trade, SwapperD will ask for your approval, just like trading with MetaMask. Enter your password and click to execute.

SwapperD transaction approval

Note: leave SwapperD to run in the background as this is necessary for the trade to execute. If SwapperD goes offline funds will not be lost, it will just continue to attempt to execute the swap when it comes online or will expire after 24hrs.

We encourage all to trial SwapperD and please let us know if you have any thoughts or comments. We are always striving to improve our products and every bit of feedback helps.

— Hugh Greethead, Community, Ren