Atomic Swaps were designed to be automated, self-enforcing crypto-currency exchange contracts that allow crypto-currencies to be traded peer-to-peer without the need for a trusted third party or centralized service. Even though Atomic Swap by nature is decentralized, most of the exchanges that provide Atomic Swap services usually depend on some central server. This server is used mostly for swap pair matching and swap request or order book management.
Over the last 8 weeks I have been working on True Swap, which tries to remove these dependencies of a centralized trusted server by completely shifting the swap pair matching and order book management to the blockchain and the client application itself.
How True Swap Works
True Swap is a complete decentralized exchange where users can come and place their Swap requests either in Ethereum or Tezos and get their assets exchanged without any centralized server facilitating the swap process. True Swap currently supports Ethereum and Tezos and is deployed on the testnets - Goerli and Carthagenet.
True Swap provides two options, a user can either create a new swap request or respond to an existing request. When a new swap request is created by a user(also called the initiator) the client app directly places the request into the corresponding blockchain contract, the funds are also locked in for a specified period of time with that request. Unlike normal swap contracts this request swap doesn’t not have the counter-party details when it is initiated.
Another user(also called the counter-party) can now query the blockchain directly to get a list of all the valid swap requests and respond to a request that suits their needs, similar to the swap request creation the client app generates a swap response in the blockchain contract and locks in the assets.
Once a response is found the initiator and counter-party fill in the details of the participants in their respective swaps after which the client app proceeds with the actual swap and finally completes the exchange.
All the stages of the swap from the beginning to the end are performed through the client application itself, after the swap request and responses are created the client app will automatically take over and complete the swap on behalf of the user.
If a suitable response is not found the swap will be automatically refunded after the specified expiry time by the client app.
Limitations
Currently the only way to complete a swap is to wait for a peer to respond to the swap directly, this can take some time, the client app automation helps in this by taking over the swap after it’s creation by the user and automatically redeeming or refunding the assets. Another way to overcome this time barrier is to introduce liquidity pools, the users can then instantly swap assets with the pool in exchange for some specified fee(reward for liquidity provider).
Besides the time duration, it is a requirement for the client app to be online throughout the swap process because all transactions are carried out by the application itself, if the app goes offline during an active swap currently it is not possible to resume.
This project was created as a part of the Tezos India Fellowship 2020, I would like to thank the whole Tezos India team for providing this opportunity and for their constant support. I would also like to thank my mentor Mike Radin and the Cryptonomic team for providing their guidance and support.
Links
- Code Repository : https://github.com/gdsoumya/AtomicSwap
- Live Application : https://gdsoumya.github.io/AtomicSwap
- Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sm22k-VLBM&t