Back in October news.Bitcoin.com reported on the influx of development tied to Drivechain, a project initiated by software developer Paul Sztorc. At the time we also covered the project’s extension applications coded by the programmer Andreas Brekken. One of those applications Brekken conceived allowed any Drivenet coins to be swapped between any blockchain protocol. On Friday, an application called Sideshift.ai was used to demonstrate a bitcoin core (BTC) to tether (USDT) swap using the Lightning Network.
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Introducing Sideshift
Jan. 11 saw a demonstration of Sideshift.ai, an application that allows users to swap cryptocurrencies between chains. Sideshift was first revealed last year by Andreas Brekken among the suite of applications he created for the Drivechain project. Brekken is the chief executive officer of the review site Shitcoin.com and the infamous coder who once held the most BTC ($220,000) on the Lightning Network last year. The Sideshift platform allows people to convert coins for a small fee with a processing time of under five seconds.
In the demonstration, Sideshift, processes a swap between BTC held on the Lightning Network and tether (USDT) using the Eclair mobile wallet for Android. At the moment the Sideshift application is in its very early stages, but users can experiment with the “test pilot stage.” However, in order to access the testing stage, a special code is required and Sideshift’s Twitter handle will only give codes to eager testers who have a Bitcointalk.org account that’s more than two years old.
Furthermore, the Sideshift application is not accessible to residents living in North Korea or the United States. Of course, the U.S. ban is likely due to the overreaching financial laws in the country. U.S. law enforcement agencies and regulators could potentially prosecute individuals and organizations by threatening them with criminal charges for performing financial transactions.
Cross-Chain Swapping Platforms Are Still Very Experimental
In order to view Sideshift, we changed our proxy to an EU-based server and got a glimpse of the platform that operates similarly to Shapeshift, but without involving know-your-customer (KYC) guidelines. Looking at the past transactions recorded on Sideshift’s main page, testers have been swapping very small fractions of cryptocurrencies.
The platform shows all the currencies that can be swapped, which include BCH, BTC, LTC, ZEC, USDT, XMR, DASH, ETC, ETH, DAI, and SPANK. Sideshift further lists the conversion rates for each digital asset paired against the other listed coins. At the time of publication, the last shift was seven hours ago using the Lightning Network with 0.0003 BTC for 0.008601 ETH. There’s also a swap between 0.0149022 BTC and 0.9805 ZEC that doesn’t involve the Lightning Network.
Over the last few months, after Shapeshift adopted KYC, cryptocurrency enthusiasts have been in search for platforms that offer anonymous crypto swaps. Since then a bunch of digital asset ‘shifting’ applications have popped out of the woodwork. Cross-chain atomic swaps have also been a trending topic among digital currency proponents as many veterans have little trust in third party exchanges. Even though Sideshift does provide quick cross-chain trades, testers should remember the platform is still in its infancy. So those who do obtain the access code from Sideshift administrator should probably only use small fractions of cryptocurrency.
What do you think about the Sideshift.ai application? Let us know your thoughts about this subject in the comments section below.
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Image credits: Shutterstock, Twitter, and Sideshift.ai.
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