Atomic swap is a much needed feature in the cryptocurrency space. The ability to trade coins or tokens across different chains without any third party, trusted party or middleman solves many of the problems we have:
- Centralized services hold the users’ funds and charge ridiculous withdrawal fees.
- Users do not have control over their own funds.
- Even though decentralized exchanges are great, users still cannot perform a trade/swap at a fixed rate outside of them.
Great. But current atomic swap implementations are not perfect due to the following reasons:
- There are no easy solutions to perform swaps between two completely different chain implementations.
- They are slow unless executed through payment channels (eg. Lightning Network).
- They are time consuming. In certain implementations, if one party chose to delay the transfer the other party’s funds get locked up until the hashed time lock contract expires.
- It is difficult to perform atomic swaps on coins that do not have native smart contract capabilities (eg. XRP).
- Cross chain atomic swaps usually require you to possess a wrapped token instead of the real coin (eg. wBTC instead of BTC).
Early this year CoinDesk published the following article to further emphasize the importance of cross-chain atomic swaps.
But how far are we from true cross-chain atomic swaps?
Traditional Atomic Swaps Methods
The most popular atomic swap implementation is done by utilizing hashed timelock contracts.
This means that to support swaps the applicant’s chain has to fulfill some conditions. To be a candidate, it is crucial to support smart contracts with hashed timelock contracts capability.
Atomic swap using traditional methods is hard work, lots and lots of it. Bridges have to be built across all different chains to be supported. The majority if not most of the prominent atomic swaps currently in the market is done this way (Komodo, Decred, Atomic Wallet, Altcoins.io).
As an example, to perform a swap between QTUM and Ethereum networks we require a smart contract to be deployed on QTUM and another on Ethereum, for the purpose of interacting with each other.
Things can get very rough and tough if we want to scale to support a vast number of chains.
And it only gets tougher if we want to support all the possible combinations of swap for all chains.
The amount of smart contracts required to support n number of chains is n*(n-1).
Thus, in order to have a working atomic swap implementation we need 12 smart contracts for 4 chains, 20 smart contracts for 5 chains and 30 smart contracts for just 6 chains!
Enter Emblem Vault
Emblem Vault is the first dedicated product to be running on top of the COVAL (Circuits of Value) protocol.
Emblem Vault has the ability to support atomic swaps amongst 99.99% of the cryptocurrencies out there! I am not exaggerating, it can handle swaps between all the different chain implementations, and what is even better it has support for currencies that do not even exist yet.
It is also the one and only Universal Wallet implementation that can easily support swapping all the coins in the world using a decentralized and trustless model.
Some interesting facts:
- Emblems can not only contain cryptocurrencies, it can contain files and all things digital.
- Emblems allow us to trade many kinds of tokens at once in a single transaction (swapping 1 BTC with 5 CryptoKitties, 2 Ether and 5 Neos).
- Emblems have native support for few types of blockchain games, so you can view and trade your CryptoKitties for CryptoZombies (So you can trade 100 weak kitties for 1 powerful zombie).
That is not all, Emblem Vault is a core part of the COVAL ecosystem.
COVAL was created to enable a platform of movable value through sidechains.
Work for COVAL and Emblem Vault started around 2 years ago with extensive R&D and prototyping.
COVAL is the brainchild of two highly intelligent developers/entrepreneurs who have been in the blockchain space as early as 2012.
- Michael Sullivan
- Shannon Null Code
P.S. The word ‘crowdfunding’ is coined by Michael Sullivan.
To find out more and how it works, see the latest presentation by Shannon Code.
Read the latest press release by the team.
Read the COVAL Medium posts.
Follow COVAL on twitter.
And join the chat if you please.
Thank you.
Disclaimer: This is not a financial advice. DYOR and nuggets you shall find.
