specification for the atomic swap communications side-channel?

[markblundeberg]

I am thinking for the non-lightning crypto swaps, it would be great if the wider community could settle on some kind of standard for the side channel protocol. I'm not sure if there is any movement in this direction so I'm just leaving an issue post here to inquire.

One reason I ask is that I hope at some point there is a plugin for Electrum / Electron Cash that lets users make atomic swaps, and ideally it would interoperate with decred, and with swap tools that may appear for other wallets. I may even write such a plugin myself.

There is perhaps not any need to freeze a protocol yet but I hope that with your practical experience, something elegant could be settled on.

At the risk of self-promoting too much, I would hope the protocol also supported other variants of atomic swap contract, too. And maybe even to permit swaps carrying OP_RETURN data like the colored coins token system we just implemented. :-D

Cheers!

[devwarrior777]

You echo my thoughts w.r.t. interoperability between electrum and core wallets. I was thinking much about this over the last 2 days - coincidence? The decred contract itself is standardized so a specific plugin for electrum would be one way to go for now.

Later a more flexible approach might be more desirable.

I agree that some kind of protocol that we all agree upon would help adoption of atomic swaps greatly. I have struggled to figure out how a normal user would negotiate an atomic swap sequence .. and how to build that out in a UI.

[jmozah]

I have struggled to figure out how a normal user would negotiate an atomic swap sequence .. and how to build that out in a UI.

I was thinking of this for the pas few days to implement in our DEX. For now i was leaning towards generating a raw transaction which users can sign using electrum or armory. I this way they dont have to trust a plugin or something.

[xorzero777]

Yep, sounds good as a first approximation . . . but I would like to do a plugin later. I may have less of a problem getting trust from the specific small set of users I have than is the general case.