Many of us in the cryptocurrency space have been waiting for the next major market contraction for several years, and it has finally arrived, in spectacular fashion. COVID-19 and government response to it are disrupting markets in a way that few could have expected, putting a massive strain on markets already leveraged to the point of malfunction. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve System (“FRS”), is running the same plays it did during the 2008 crisis to address the market contraction: a combination of reducing its target interest rate and using effectively-unlimited credit to backstop various markets directly. Since Bitcoin was released shortly after the 2008 crisis, many people have come to understand the substantial …
As many of you know, yesterday marked the first cross-chain atomic swap between Decred and Litecoin. This is an important step in a direction that allows users to conduct trustless, cross-chain, over-the-counter (“OTC”) trades without a third party. This disintermediates the exchange process between cryptocurrencies that support these swap transactions. We have created some simple prototype tools under the atomicswap repository, dcratomicswap, btcatomicswap and ltcatomicswap, to allow Decred, Bitcoin and Litecoin users to swap between DCR, BTC and LTC using on-chain atomic swaps. These tools were built for those who we have the means at hand to disintermediate the exchange process: transaction script and OP_CLTV support. It is worth noting …