XMR-BTC swaps: A great success (to be continued)
Bringing XMR-BTC swaps to the community is one of the most rewarding projects we have been working on. In this blogpost we summarize where we started, what the latest release has to offer and what is planned for the future!
A little bit of history
In June 2020 we set out to bring atomic swaps to Monero. The basis for this was h4sh3d's protocol, initially presented at 36C3.
Pretty much a year has passed since then and looking back now, we have to say it has been a great success!
On October 6th 2020, after the successful finalisation of the XMR-BTC swap PoC Lucas published our first blogpost explaining XMR-BTC swaps. At it's core the protocol described in the initial blogpost is still the same.
Our vision was to offer a usable tool that allows people to trade the XMR/BTC pair. Whilst that sounds simple initially, we set ourselves some challenges:
- The trading needs to be trustless, hence the need for an atomic-swap protocol.
- Trading involves buying AND selling.
- Trading involves matching up a taker with a maker.
Where are we now
With the latest release (0.8.0), our tool is now feature complete! The release adds the long awaited functionality of automated maker discovery.
Running the simple command of:
will get you a list of sellers (market makers) that are willing to sell XMR for BTC. Here is what this looks like in action:
The way this works under the hood is that the CLI connects to a rendezvous-point, configurable via --rendezvous-point.
The protocol in use here is the libp2p rendezvous protocol.
While still in its infancy, it is serving us well to deliver a working version of maker discovery.
Once connected to the rendezvous point, the CLI requests a list of registrations for a predetermined namespace.
An ASB provider can configure their instance to automatically publish such a registration on startup.
We've created a simple daemon that can act as a rendezvous point: https://github.com/comit-network/rendezvous-server. In the example above, the tool is connecting to an instance of this daemon that we are hosting for our own testing purposes. People are welcome to test their own setup against this rendezvous point.
Hosting a rendezvous point is dead easy!
- Download the latest release.
- Run as per usage instructions
- Make sure your port is forwarded if you are behind NAT.
- Done!
Other people can now use your rendezvous point to register their ASB instance and CLI users will be able to discover them!
But wait, did we say the tool is feature-complete? Not quite unfortunately.
We would really like to offer buying AND selling for the user but this is blocked by transaction chaining / pre-signing landing in Monero. You can learn more on that topic in this blogpost.
In summary, we have pretty much delivered exactly what we wanted:
A usable tool that allows users to trustlessly trade the XMR/BTC pair.
What's next
We are still very keen on offering the missing feature of selling XMR for BTC. We are hoping to pick that feature up once transaction chaining becomes possible on Monero.
Additionally, we also had some ideas on what could be built on top of or with our tool:
- Swaps completely in the browser:
Rust is a great language for targeting WASM.
Compiling everything to WASM would enable swaps completely within the browser, no download necessary.
The major obstacle here is our dependency on
monero-wallet-rpcwhich we currently start transparently in the background. This will either need to be replaced by something like monero-javascript or a pure Rust implementation of a Monero wallet. Both approaches are not exactly a weekend project but well within reach for anyone that knows their way around Rust. - A GUI for the swap CLI: At the moment, all that is offered to the user is a CLI. Whilst sufficient for expert users and to showcase that it works, a proper GUI would be a lot more user-friendly. Fortunately, the CLI is completely non-interactive. If anyone wants to build a GUI, the recommended way would be to start the CLI for the user in the background and process the logs delivered on stderr. An adventurous developer could also try to build a GUI directly in Rust and integrate on a library level.
- A mobile app. We have very little experience in our team when it comes to writing mobile apps which is why we didn't focus on this at all. For all we know, Rust can target Android as well as iOS which means there should be a way of getting this onto mobile!
This list is by no means exhaustive, and we would love for others to jump onto some of these ideas. Whilst we will not be pushing any of those forward ourselves, we are more than happy to assist by participating and steering discussions and reviewing pull requests.
Thanks to the community for the contributions so far:
- Documentation (#609, #614, #533)
- CLI QR code for Bitcoin deposit #547
- Configurable rate websocket for the ASB #585
As always, jump into our channels if you want to get in touch: #comit-monero:matrix.org.
Happy swapping!