We’re excited to announce that Arwen Beta will shortly go live on KuCoin! Arwen allows traders to self-custody coin while trading on a centralized exchange’s orderbook, through the use of on-blockchain escrows and secure cross-chain atomic swaps.
You will soon be able to use Arwen in Beta to trade the LTC-BTC and BCH-BTC pairs on KuCoin’s centralized orderbook. In this blog post, we cover what you can expect when using Arwen while it is in Beta.
Trading amounts are limited
Because Arwen is in Beta, we’ve temporarily limited the amount of coin you can lock in escrow and trade. Currently, each escrow you can open with Arwen is limited about $120 USD worth of coin, and each trade is limited to about $20 USD worth of coin. The number of escrows that may be open at the same time, by a single user, is also limited during this Beta period.
Arwen security road map
We are working hard to enhance security and add features to the current Beta release of Arwen. Below is a list of just some of the security features we’re working on, that will be included in future releases of Arwen.
- Open-source the Arwen daemon. The Arwen Daemon is the executable that sits on the trader’s desktop, and speaks Arwen on the trader’s behalf. We recognize that trustless software must be open source. Therefore, in the coming months, we plan to open-source the Arwen Daemon so that it can be audited by the community.
The Arwen Hub, which speaks Arwen on behalf of the exchange, will remain closed source. This does NOT affect the trader’s security, because as described below, the Arwen Trading Protocol protects the trader’s coin, even if the Arwen Hub is hacked, malicious, or goes offline. In other words, Arwen is designed to ensure that the security of the Arwen Hub cannot affect the security of the trader. - Bug-bounty program. We plan to introduce a bug-bounty program once the Arwen Daemon is open-sourced.
- SPV client. Today, the Arwen Daemon looks for on-blockchain transactions by asking third-party servers for their view of the blockchain. Future releases of the Arwen App will include an SPV lite client will instead verify the proof-of-work on block headers in order to confirm that transactions have been confirmed on the blockchain.
- Give users full control of automatic updates. Arwen is currently under rapid improvements while it is in Beta. As such, we’ve elected to enable an autoupdate feature that force-updates the Arwen daemon and Arwen App whenever we push out a new release. In the future, we will give the trader more control about when and whether they’d like to have their Arwen app update.
Arwen Trading Protocol Security Assumptions
The Arwen Trading Protocols ensure that the trader’s coins are safe even if an attacker compromises the exchange, or the Arwen Hub that speaks Arwen on behalf of the exchange. This holds as long as the trader remembers to
1. close her escrows before they expire.
2. come online during the coin recovery period indicated by the Arwen App, in the unlikely event that the exchange improperly aborts one of her trades.
The traders’ coins are safe if she remembers to do items 1 and 2 above. If the user forgets to do items 1 or 2 above, then her coins are at risk only if the exchange is hacked or malicious.
Using Arwen
We hope you enjoy trading with Arwen while it is in Beta!
To learn more, you can read our support documents, or email your questions to support@arwen.io.
