Charlie Lee of Litecoin and Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni of Monero have been meeting and there is talks of collaboration between the two projects coming from both of them on Twitter.
ATOMIC SWAPS
Charlie Lee and Litecoin are wellknown for being one of the first to implement atomic swaps; first between LTC and BTC but later also for projects like Vertcoin. Atomic swaps are essentially a method of switching one cryptocurrency for another, making the two interoperable. It is a way of exchanging without an exchange as a middleman; I send you x amount of LTC and you send me x amount of BTC.After fluffypony jokingly tweeted about a merger of the Litecoin Enterprise Alliance and the Monero Enterprise Alliance into one (neither of them exist) Charlie Lee responded in a more serious tone:
(source: Twitter)
Atomic swaps between Monero and Litecoin would indeed be huge! At first it may seem unimportant, but Charlie's point about Litecoin's liquidity is on point. By enabling atomic swaps between Monero and Litecoin, it essentially means you can sell your Monero everywhere where Litecoin is being sold.
It doesn't change Monero's privacy either: It's all private and untraceable until you atomic swap it into Litecoin. At that point it becomes traceable, but at this moment you're (probably) sending to an exchange to sell anyway where your privacy is compromised for that sale. Your remaining Monero stack would still be invisible and anonymous. In fact, exchanges will not even know you're selling Monero.. because you're just selling Litecoin at that point. Which is accepted almost as widely as Bitcoin.
Similarly, the other way around it adds privacy to Litecoin. By atomic swapping into and back from Monero, is essentially the same as running it through a tumbler. You can deposit your LTC into a new address and nobody would know your old address and new address would be linked in any way.
I hope Charlie Lee goes through with this plan. It may be a precursor to atomic swaps between XMR and BTC at some point in the future, as LTC and BTC are almost identical in build.
For now these are still suggestions and talks, and nothing is set in stone yet. However I think there may be some follow-up, as Charlie himself seems very keen on the idea and I see no reason for the Monero community to not want this.
Also, this gives me a chance to post some of these strange Darth Vader themed propaganda-style Monero pictures that I found. Not sure what Darth Vader has to do with Monero, but okay:
