XMR/BTC Atomic Swaps a major bullish technical development

2021年6月2日

XMR can now be traded directly to Bitcoin without an intermediary exchange on their native Blockchains using a technology called an Atomic Swap. This differs greatly from other so called swap platforms that only allow internal trading between ERC20 tokens, the major difference being that the XMR/BTC swaps are trading actual coins with their own blockchains not wrapped coins or some other semantics. This has a few major implications for the future price of XMR we will explore in this analysis.

1. XMR/BTC Swaps are being added to both XMR Wallets such as Monerujo as well as popular Bitcoin wallets such as Samurai wallet. Greatly expanding the exposure of Monero to many BTC users who will be learning about its competitive features for the first time so we should expect some uptake of Monero from simple exposure as well as the low cost and ease diversifying some BTC to XMR. Many users find getting Monero more difficult than other tokens because exchanges like Coinbase do not list it even though they would like to have exposure.

2. This technology increases the regulatory resilience of privacy tokens because now anyone with XMR can get BTC and vice versa easily so banning privacy coins has no effect unless you ban all coins which can be traded for privacy coins through atomic swaps. Regulators have to balance the need to trace all transactions with protecting users against having their information exposed to bad actors and front runners. Monero has the ability to be semi transparent so users can pay taxes audit balances without giving everyone access to the sensitive user information. Monero will provide users the important protections they deserve and push regulators to take a balanced measured approach.

3. Monero fees are significantly lower than Bitcoins fees which means in any situation where both BTC and XMR are accepted users would be inclined to use the XMR to save the large fee. XMR is the only POW coins with such low fees and no ico, dev tax, pre mine, masternode, presale where in Monero everyone mines equally ( a key to bitcoins success and the thermodynamic underpinnings of the economic system ) which will in turn incentivize users to pay with Monero not Bitcoin.

4. It is cheaper for users to HODL Monero and convert it to Bitcoin where necessary than to HODL Bitcoin and convert it to Monero when necessary. Imagine Bob wants to buy steam cards and the site accepts both BTC and Monero. Bob realizes that when he pays with BTC his transaction fee is almost $20 and that when he pays with XMR his transaction fee is more like $0.2 but another site that Bob uses frequently accepts just Bitcoin. Bob realizes that if he keeps his money in Bitcoin it will cost him a high transaction fee every time he wants to convert it to Monero so he would never save anything by using Monero to buy his Steam cards because hed have to create Bitcoin transactions which defeats the point because now your paying $20 to convert the BTC into XMR and again to send the XMR to the merchant. By contrast if he keeps his money in Monero he will save where Monero is accepted and it will cost him just $0.2 to convert his Monero into Bitcoin when he needs or wants to.

5. Tari is a platform for issuing tokens ( like erc20) as an XMR sidechain. The atomic swaps will allow for easy conversion between Monero, Tari based tokens and Bitcoin without an intermediary. Most token platforms will be inclined to convert their platform over to Tari from ETH or Binance because its far more decentralized, easy to convert to both BTC and Monero, the tokens can be private or transparent and the transaction fees are much lower than ETH gas.

This also applies to Monero based alt coins such as WoWnero which can adopt the swap technology as well. ( If you use alts look for ones with no dev tax, presale, ico, POS, premine but rather a coin which everyone even the creators mine equally )