Monero: implementation of atomic swaps financed

The proposed implementation of the atomic swaps on Monero has been fully financed.

The announcement was made by the Twitter profile of the Monero project, which also warns that development will begin soon and that updates will be provided frequently. 

ICYMI: The Atomic Swaps implementation proposal was fully funded by our community! The team will commence shortly and updates will be provided frequently to the community and donors. https://t.co/RJjDWCer7a

— Monero (XMR) (@monero) November 8, 2020

The aim of this development is to make atomic swaps between BTC and XMR possible via trustless and P2P onchain transactions. 

In fact, this is not possible to date, due to the lack of timelock contracts with hash on the Monero blockchain. 

Thanks to the funding of the proposal, development and testing activities will begin to implement the new functionality. 

Atomic Swap on Monero, a ready-made project

According to what is mentioned in the official statement, the protocol allowing atomic swaps on Monero would in theory already be ready and implementable, but it still needs to be tested on the mainnet. The ultimate goal is to create a client/daemon that can run this new onchain functionality. 

Trustless atomic swaps between BTC and XMR could be useful for example for those who own BTC and want to exchange them onchain with a high level of privacy, not obtainable on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

Instead, Monero’s blockchain allows onchain transactions with a high level of privacy, so the ability to easily swap BTC to XMR, and vice versa, would allow Monero’s privacy to be used to make transactions in BTC as well. 

Moreover, since XMR might in theory have some problems being traded on centralized exchanges in the future, atomic swaps would make it possible to trade directly on DEXs.

The expected duration for the development and implementation of this new feature is 7 months, with a cost of 2,727 XMR, equal to about $319,000. 

The development could be completed in the second quarter of 2021. 

Three development phases of 6, 14 and 12 weeks respectively have been identified.