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Welcome to the Atomic Swap Wallet wiki!

You can view the testnet Atomic Swap Wallet live here: https://swap.altcoin.io/

Atomic swaps give the crypto community a safe way to trade across different blockchains, quickly and with minimal fees. Although not a new idea — bitcointalk forumites debated them in 2013 — the technology has overcome some big hurdles in the last few months, with several successful real-world tests (including one of our own).

We believe atomic swaps are an important key to decentralized trading where you are fully in control of your tokens at all times. So we’d like to share how they’ve evolved, their potential, and why they’ll change how you trade for the better.

What is an atomic swap?

An atomic swap is atomic in the sense that if the swap isn’t successful, neither party loses out. The swap takes place or it doesn’t — there are no half measures. There are two kinds of atomic swap: on-chain and off-chain. On-chain swaps are great, but off-chain swaps take this concept to another level as they’re nearly instant, private, and require almost zero fees.

Both kinds use hashed-time-locked-contracts, or HTLCs. These ensure that neither party can take the offered funds without first offering their own. For example, let’s assume Alice and Bob want to exchange BTC for ETH. Alice sends her BTC, Bob sends his ETH, and each declares receipt of their new coins by confirming a cryptographic code, issued by the HTLC. If neither or only one of them confirms the code within a set timeframe, both sets of coins return to their original owners and the exchange is canceled.

_“Cross-Chain Atomic Swaps, where you can swap currencies from two Blockchain’s with two transactions that are trustless, and where neither participant can cheat, means that we could see many more decentralized cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency exchanges. So we’ll see how that happens. I think that will be really interesting.” — Andreas Antonopoulos

Get started here: https://github.com/AltCoinExchange/altcoin-atomic-trading-platform/wiki/Setup-Instructions

Altcoin.io Team https://www.altcoin.io/

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