Submarine Swaps are Now Live on Mainnet

Here's the link: https://submarineswaps.org/

A while ago Alex Bosworth shared some of the work he is doing to develop swap technology. Among the various types of swaps he was working on (click here for a rundown in text), a tech called "submarine swaps" was the one he was closest to completing, and now he's got a version running live on mainnet. (Try it out here.) Submarine swaps can be explained in several ways, but one of them is this: it allows basically any blockchain user with almost any type of cryptocurrency to make payments on the lightning network without even running a lightning node.

In principle, submarine swaps can work with any cryptocurrency that supports a few very basic scripts, ones that almost all of them already support. By this method you can trustlessly make lightning payments using almost any cryptocurrency. As a result, the lightning network will no longer be limited to just bitcoin and litecoin. Eventually you'll be able to submarine swap in reverse too, and use lightning to pay people on other blockchains without trusting anyone with your funds -- but right now only a few blockchain-to-lightning payments are supported, and no lightning-to-blockchain payments have been coded up yet. Check it out -- it went live on the mainnet very recently!

I believe the plan is to eventually put this code directly into LND before it reaches its 1.0 release. That way, the lightning network will have a foundation that lets it work with almost every other cryptocurrency.

Submitted August 21, 2018 at 11:39PM by dmar198 http://bit.ly/2MHh9yW