Atomic swaps are now happening and that is a great development for cryptocurrency. A fair amount of developers are spending a lot of time enabling these transactions and making them available to cryptocurrency users. There are quite a few old-school techniques that most users have adopted in order to exchange their crypto. Lightning Labs has very recently announced that it has come up with a new way to facilitate these cross-chain atomic swaps. Specifically between Bitcoin and Litecoin. This is a huge development in the cryptocurrency world!
It is fascinating to follow the interest developers are showing to cryptocurrency, and the major advancements that are happening at a fast rate. Although, still far away from performing decentralised exchange solutions, Lightining Lab has claimed that it has come up with a very smart solution to this. On the 16th of November, on the Lighting blog, the following was announced:
“Today, Lightning Labs is excited to announce that we have successfully tested the first Lightning cross-chain atomic swap between the Bitcoin and Litecoin testnets.”
Both Bitcoin and Litecoin have implemented Segwit making both networks capable of performing these swaps. This new technology from Lightining Lab is very exciting for the cryptocurrency world, and certainly a big advancement.
So how does this work? For one, the Lightining Network contains a special payment type called the Hashed Timelocked Contracts. This allows for atomic swaps to occur very differently from regular swaps. The contract means that any party can withdraw their cash at any time as long as they are able to provide their swap commitment transaction, making these payments very secure.
Lightning payments also allow the atomic swaps to either completely succeed, or completely fail. The important aspect is that both parties that are completing the transaction will become sender and receiver in order to finalize the swap.
This development is certainly exciting a lot of users, however lots of testing needs to occur in the following months in order to make sure that this project has no glitches.
