#Introduction

Did you lose your first Bitcoin at Mt. Gox? Are you annoyed about the lack of privacy in today's Internet? Do you think cryptocurrencies are the future?

At CoBloX, we are working on the financial system of tomorrow. We believe it has to be open and accessible to everyone, whilst also retaining privacy and putting the user first by giving them control over their money. We believe that only cryptocurrencies can achieve this which is why we see them as a fundamental building block for this system. In particular, we focus on cross-chain protocols like atomic swaps.

"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.", Jon Kabat-Zinn

COMIT's vision is to have an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship resistant and non-discriminatory. And we believe that Bitcoin is the most promising platform for such an open financial system due to its decentralization and its censorship resistance.

Ultimately we would love to see such an open financial system be built on top of Bitcoin, however, as of today, Bitcoin lacks privacy and only supports a single asset (BTC).

As mentioned in Project Droplet, we believe that Liquid is such a platform allowing us to build a financial ecosystem around Bitcoin. We see the possibility to build products such as lending and borrowing, prediction markets (option/futures) and even saving products. All of these share a basic building block: trading.

Over the last 2 weeks we looked into Blockstream's sidechain Liquid. We explored its confidential transaction format [2] and built a little PoC which enables two parties to swap atomically 2 assets on Liquid [1].

Our mission is to connect all the blockchains, without adding yet another one. Our vision is that we believe in a censorship-resistant & non-discriminating open financial market for everyone.

Bitcoin is the major player in the decentralised financial ecosystem but has a traceability issue, stopping it to be truly censorship-resistant & non-discriminating. Monero is a privacy focused coin, it is fungible and non-traceable and the most used privacy coin [1].

These characteristics make XMR-BTC cross-blockchain applications a great candidate to push towards our vision.

At COMIT, we believe in an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship resistant and non-discriminating.

We knew from day one that opensource software was the only way to achieve our vision, and we love opensource so it never was an issue.

However, we realised that while we licensed our project with open licenses [1] [2], there were other obstacles on the way to declare us truly open:

A droplet is a small column of liquid, bounded completely or almost completely by free surfaces.

COMIT's mission is to have an open financial system - truly inclusive, censorship resistant and non-discriminatory. Such a financial system has to allow for exchange of funds between different market participants such as investors, lenders and borrowers in a trustless manner. Liquid [1] seems to be a promising platform for such marketplaces as it has built-in support for different assets in a single transaction while keeping amounts, addresses and assets confidential. These features used in combination allow us to create trustless and private atomic swaps, trustless loans and other financial products.

#Confidential Atomic Swaps on Liquid

We are kicking-off a new project to look into Liquid's transaction format which would allow us to do true atomic swaps between two assets. This would allow us to have true trustless BTC/USD (using L-BTC and L-USDT) while all amounts, assets and addresses are confidential. This is huge as it is one step closer to a truly trustless and censorship resistant financial system.

If deemed useful, this might be the start of a longer series of R&D projects focusing on Blockstream's sidechain Liquid.

#Ambrosia

We recently released ambrosia, a GUI allowing BTC to DAI peer-to-peer and non-custodial trading powered by COMIT. This release marked our change of focus from providing tools to developer to directly targeting end users.

We spent the last weeks demonstrating this MVP to several users, we had interesting feedback and conversation with various user profiles, from trader to hodler.

#A Change of Direction

Last year, we spent time and effort creating tools, such as create-comit-app and comit-scripts to allow developers to build their own COMIT Apps. We organised local meetups in Sydney and even a hackathon in Singapore. We had a number of developers excited about the technology and possibilities that COMIT bring in but very few committed to build an app.

We now realize that before we can expect others to build successful apps with our tools, we should demonstrate what can be done with COMIT ourselves.

Over half a year ago we proved that Grin-Bitcoin atomic swaps were possible and now we're back to show you how it can be done for the monero-bitcoin pair. In our effort to connect all the blockchains without adding yet another, we have turned our attentions to Monero. Similar to Grin, Monero is a public ledger in which the source, destination and amount of a transaction remain hidden to observers.

The team has been interested in Monero for a long time, but until recently we assumed that atomic swaps involving it were unfeasible due to its lack of support for timelocks.

Applied in the right circumstances, using GitFlow as your branching model can make life significantly easier. The COMIT team decided to adopt GitFlow for comit-rs quite some time ago because it allows development to continue while a release is in progress, hence removing friction from our development flow.

This post gives a quick overview of how we are using GitHub actions to automate most of the aspects around drafting releases.