Atomic swaps enable two parties who don’t know or trust each other to trade without a trusted third party. Through smart contract escrows, the atomic swap is guaranteed to either execute successfully or refund the parties involved. By eliminating a third party intermediary, atomic swaps offer traders greater security, privacy, and cost-savings.The smart contracts used for Liquality’s atomic swaps are completely user-owned-and-deployed. It is impossible for us to add middlemen fees, censor your transaction, or activate a kill switch, like most other “decentralized” exchanges.

HTLCs form the foundational primitives for applications such as atomic swaps, the Lightning Network, and more. Their role as time-bound conditional escrows for transactions significantly reduce counterparty risk for traders. Liquality HTLCs are based on the battle-tested standards BIP199 and ERC1630, which are highly secure, have the lowest fees, and are interoperable with future HTLC-based applications.