Escrowless Siafund Swaps

Today we’re releasing Embarcadero, a new tool for conducting escrowless Siafund/Siacoin swaps. You can now safely trade between Sia’s native currencies with any willing counterparty, using a clean, user-friendly UI, and without ever putting your funds at risk. Get it here.

Ever since Sia’s mainnet release, users have been interested in trading Siafunds. But due to the low volume and indivisibility of the asset, few exchanges support it. Consequently, traders have relied on trusted escrow services to conduct such trades. But hey — we’re talking about cryptocurrency here! While we’re very grateful to the community members who acted as escrow agents over the years, leaving your coins at the mercy of a 3rd party has no place in a web3 future. Embarcadero enables truly direct peer-to-peer trades, using whatever communication channel (Discord, Telegram, reddit, etc.) you desire. The swaps themselves are atomic, meaning only a single transaction is necessary, and there’s no intermediate state where you’ve sent your SF but the counterparty hasn’t sent SC. The swap either completes successfully, instantly swapping SF for SC, or it doesn’t.

Beyond the raw functionality of the app itself, Embarcadero also serves as a showcase of what to expect in Sia v2. Our app design language has been overhauled in tandem with our new sia.tech website (expected to go live later this quarter), and we’ll carry that aesthetic into the v2 renter, host, and wallet apps. The UI is also contained within a regular browser — rather than yet-another-Electron-app running on your desktop — so it’s responsive, lightweight, and remotely accessible. Of course, for the graybeards like me who prefer CLI apps, you can trade from your terminal too:

Wrapping up, this marks the first release of Sia software developed entirely in-house at the Foundation, and we’re excited to share it with the community. Give it a try, let us know what you think, and pay your respects to all the escrow agents who are now out of a job. ;)