Undoubtedly, one of the events that most attracted the attention of the bitcoin community and the crypto-community in general was the creation of atomic swaps or atomic exchanges. These are, in essence, transactions directly from one blockchain to another different one; that is to say, without houses of change, nor any other intermendiary participating in the same one.
The first we could appreciate in relation to Bitcoin, was the fact by two of the developers of Zcash, Jay Grabber and Ariel Gabizon, who managed to demonstrate live a way to carry out exchanges between Zcash and BTC. Then, in October there was an exchange between ethers (the cryptocurrency of Ethereum) and bitcoins, which was carried out by a team of Altcoin Exchange developers. The most recent was the first atomic exchange between Litecoin and Bitcoin, specifically between the testnets of both platforms, in which SegWit had already been activated.