Atomic Swaps: Building the basis of cross-chain interop for Meros, Monero, and Nano

Atomic swaps are pivotal to cryptocurrencies. They allow completely secure transference of funds between two users, without any centralized exchanges or third parties. They enable connecting networks in ways which have only recently been realized. It’s for this reason, we are very excited to announce having conducted the first atomic swaps between Meros and Bitcoin!

Previously, this wasn’t possible. Atomic swaps have a series of requirements on the underlying cryptocurrencies. Since Meros has yet to launch, we were planning to spend weeks specifically adding this functionality to enable Meros to thrive when we do publish our mainnet. That said, recently the Monero community funded research into this topic, and h4sh3d, the developer of this protocol, succeeded in creating a secure swap process.

While he created this for Monero, it’s directly applicable to Meros and Nano. None of them have scripting functionality and all of them use Ed25519, a different cryptography scheme than Bitcoin. Those were the hurdles this protocol needed to, and did, overcome.

We’ve successfully created a working proof of concept, the first to implement this protocol, which can facilitate these swaps between Meros and Bitcoin. That said, it’s been explicitly designed to easily support other cryptocurrencies. Adding Monero or Nano will only take a few days, using the carefully crafted internal API. We’re excited to be able to contribute to the larger space and advance other quality cryptocurrencies with our work.

The tool itself is written in Rust, and available here. Meros traditionally uses Nim, a highly expressive language, yet Rust is known for its security and cryptographic advantages. There’s also very high-quality libraries for Monero and Nano written in Rust, making it even easier for our work to be expanded.

This is just the first major update that Meros will have over the next few weeks. While we’ve been quiet on Medium for a bit, we haven’t stopped our progress. We recently held a testnet which was very successful, and only have a few features left before we’re ready to do our final testnet. We hope to launch it in November, with it being fully open to anyone who wishes to download and run a node. We’re excited to be building towards the future of cryptocurrencies which are viable at being exactly that: currencies.

We hope for all of our community to keep a closer eye in the near future, as we continue delivering quality work. Thank you, to everyone who has supported us, and all the projects which have indirectly contributed to Meros in this collaborative space. We hope to work more closely in the future, for the benefit of everyone.