Trustless Bitcoin-Ethereum Swap: Vitalik’s Vision Becomes a Reality

Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum recently expressed the desire for a ‘trustless’ and ‘serverless’ swap between ETH-BTC and vice versa. He noted,

It’s embarrassing that we still can’t easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.

In less than a fortnight, developers at Suma have come up with an open-source ‘cross-chain swap system.’ Summa offers private, self-enforcing, and self-settling cross-chain contracts which are trustless and non-custodial.

They use the bcoin full-node implementation built with JavaScript/C/C++/Node.js which helps in the trustless integration with Bitcoin. The Summa relay (currently available only for solidity) provides the link with Ethereum in the swap system.

The twitter thread with Github codes is shared here,

And our bcoin relaylib indexes Bitcoin, to watch for these swap transactions ?https://t.co/oeyz9eV4kH

— Summa (@summa_one) April 6, 2020

Moreover, the team is working towards the interoperability of other crypto chains as well. The lead Bitcoin and cryptographic experts working on the systems were mentioned in the tweets as well,

We’re excited to continue working with our partners, @crosschaingroup, @interchain_io, @NervosNetwork, @NEARProtocol, @agoric, @CeloOrg and others to bring interoperability to every chain

Strong Correlations

Bitcoin and crypto markets are strongly intertwined in terms of price correlations. Moreover, as the systematic risk is higher, they tend to lose or gain higher than BTC in a trending move.

As the markets are beginning to turn bullish, the likelihood of altcoins benefiting from the sentiments is large. The glimpse of which was witnessed during Bitcoin’s move to $7450 yesterday.

With Bitcoin’s 8.12% rise on a daily scale, ETH records a 19.8% gain. Some of the other altcoins which also logged double-digit percentage gains include Litecoin, EOS, and Tezos. As things mature with time, a decentralized future would require seamless on-chain interaction between these protocols as well. An open-source trustless and independent swap system should not be difficult to envision.

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