BasicSwap — The Fully Private Cross-Chain DEX

When you use traditional centralized exchanges, you give control of your coins away the moment you deposit coins onto the platform. That means these coins can be stolen, frozen, seized, or hacked. This has happened several times in the past, notably the Quadriga debacle where the owner allegedly died before he could give anyone access, losing the funds of over a hundred thousand users into limbo - or the more recent Coinbase freezing of Russian assets.

BasicSwap keeps you in complete and total control over your funds, by letting you swap with other people without ever giving access to your coins away. You stay in control at every step of the way and you don’t ever have to factor in the risk of losing your coins when using the platform. That is not the case with all decentralized exchanges: the AMM model (Uniswap, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, etc), for example, makes you forfeit your private keys by sending coins into a unified liquidity pool powered by smart-contract. This has resulted in heavy losses of coins and outright scams, most famously the 2021 Pancake Bunny exploit that raked in over $200 million dollars.

Nowadays, it is uncommon to be able to use centralized exchanges without revealing every single little detail about your personal life to an entity you don’t really know or trust. This includes sending pictures of your passport, driving license, a selfie of your face, full name and address, proof of income, and even tax reports in extreme cases. Of course, as we’ve explored in depth before, all of that extremely sensitive information about yourself is routinely hacked, stolen, lost, or misused.

That’s exactly what BasicSwap stands against. Everybody should be free to swap and trade cryptocurrencies without having to dox themselves to a central authority. This is directly in line with the original cypherpunk ethos of cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin was created as a digital currency open to all, without restrictions or bias, and that’s exactly the trajectory BasicSwap is following, but instead of applying these characteristics to a currency, does so to an entire trading exchange platform.

Over the past year or so, a worrying policy has become adopted by some of the leading exchanges and blockchain service providers in the space: that of blocking access, or even seizing coins, of citizens from certain countries. We’ve seen it happen with Venezuelans and Russians, and now that the precedent is set, it could very well happen to citizens of other sovereign nations, including you.

As stated just above, this entire mentality is very anti-crypto. BasicSwap stands strong against any form of discrimination, especially when done through blanket bans of innocent citizens of certain countries based on events totally out of their control. Never will you find yourself banned or restricted from using BasicSwap, not only because the platform is opposed to any such measure, but because it is truly decentralized and simply unable to apply any sort of targeted ban in the first place. You are safe here, whatever the country you reside in or have been born into.

Depending on the exchange you use and the volume you make, trading cryptocurrencies can be expensive. While some businesses like market makers are able to gain access to no-fee trading accounts on select exchanges, this is more-often-than-not not the case for the common folks.

BasicSwap democratizes the benefits of trading without fees to everybody, not just businesses or connected insiders, effectively creating a fair level playing field trading environment for all. The only fee you’ll ever pay on BasicSwap is the typical cryptocurrency transaction fee charged by the blockchain of the coin you want to exchange. Nothing more, meaning you can optimize the value of each of your trades.

Isn’t it weird that Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency initially created to fight back against the reckless and harmful fiscal practices of national banks and the dangerous centralization of our global financial system, is now almost entirely reliant on centralized entities that are, perhaps surprisingly for some, controlled by the very same type of organizations that Bitcoin put up a fight against?

Well, we think it’s not only weird but absolutely wrong. BasicSwap is a torch in this dark night’s sky for those that want to preserve the original ethos of Bitcoin and get rid of the middleman for good. There’s not a single central party involved here, and BasicSwap lets you trade cryptocurrencies with the very same properties and benefits that a P2P Bitcoin transaction possesses. BasicSwap is not just cool tech, it is absolutely an ideologically-driven project that restores the balance of power within the cryptocurrency industry back to the people by cutting off the middleman from the asset swapping process. Enough with greedy and agenda-driven gatekeepers!

It goes without saying, whenever you trade cryptocurrencies using traditional centralized exchanges, every single bit of data about your trades and financial activity is logged in a database. Not only can access to this data be requested by (and granted to) various types of organizations, including certain questionable government agencies, but the collected information can be lost, stolen, hacked, or misused.

Additionally, privacy coins that rely on decoys, like Monero for example, see their level of privacy being decreased as more and more decoys (used to obfuscate transaction details) are owned by central parties like trading exchanges that can collude together, and with larger organizations like ill-intended governments, to put the pieces of the puzzle back together and unmask certain transactional details.

BasicSwap is all about just saying “no” to that malpractice and claiming your rights to privacy. No data, personal information, network metadata, or any sort of information is collected about you, in part because there is no central authority to do so, but also because the DEX is built with a strong privacy ethos in mind. You can swap any available currency you wish with anybody else and you never have to worry about your financial activity leaking to any unauthorized party.

Although not entirely ready for easy out-of-the-box integrations (that’s our long-term goal), the BasicSwap protocol will eventually let developers easily integrate swap or trade functionality into their apps, dApps, or services using BasicSwap-derived SDK modules. This more open-ended modular approach is the cornerstone of Particl’s upcoming evolutionary phase. It turns many of the core components of the Particl ecosystem, BasicSwap being one such critical component, into independent modules that can be leveraged by developers to integrate certain functionality into their products without having to re-implement them from scratch. As such, several modules based on BasicSwap’s back-end capabilities will be made available, allowing for easy swaps or advanced trading capabilities right from inside other apps.

The SMSG network allows BasicSwap to transfer swap and order-related data between participants from two different blockchains without the use of wrapped assets or any third-party intervention. This even includes the anonymous and rigid Monero cryptocurrency, which can be swapped for any other cryptocurrency available on BasicSwap.

This lets you make or take orders at the price you judge is fair, much like traditional centralized exchanges let you do. This gives you much more control and freedom over what price you want to swap your assets at compared to the widely spread AMM DEX model. It also protects you against liquidity pool-driven rug pulls and exploits, as it is entirely non-custodial.

That means absolute and total uncompromising freedom to trade cryptocurrencies without any boundaries, restrictions, or identification requirements. You’re free to use BasicSwap as you please and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.

BasicSwap is a fair and open-source protocol that does not seek to profit off of people but rather reinforces your rights to exchange digital assets freely. The only fee you’ll ever pay swapping on BasicSwap is the typical cryptocurrency transaction fee that you must pay every time you make a crypto transaction.

BasicSwap features full support to swap Monero pairs such as BTC/XMR and supports Particl-based RingCT and CT swaps as well. The DEX is 100% peer-to-peer, just like blockchains and torrent protocols are, with no central server. Additionally, you can enjoy the benefits of a full (but still experimental) Tor support to mask your network identity (IP address) from the rest of the network’s peers. Finally, and although not live at the moment, BasicSwap has forward compatibility with Taproot and the Lightning Network, both of which are extremely powerful protocols that will further improve scalability as well as privacy.

BasicSwap is a P2P network that runs on a vast network of nodes scattered all across the globe. There is no central server and no single point of failure — to shutdown BasicSwap, you would have to shut down the entirety of all the peers that make its network. There are also no identification requirements or any other sort of prerequisite to use BasicSwap. That means you can use it regardless of who you are, where you’re from, or how much you want to swap. BasicSwap is absolute and uncompromising freedom in its purest form.

“Not your keys, not your coins”! We’ve heard it often, but exchanges still get hacked to this day, lose their customers’ coins, or are forced by outside forces to seize and freeze accounts for a variety of reasons. BasicSwap does not suffer from the vulnerabilities that have drained AMM DEX liquidity pools dry in the past, leaving users with billions of dollars in stolen funds. BasicSwap swaps are atomic in nature, the order book is powered by SMSG, and the logic is handled by off-chain smart-contracts (scriptless scripts). You stay in control of your keys at every step of the way and never have to hand control of your coins to any third-party or unsafe smart-contract. BasicSwap is a safe and private environment.

Although Monero has had atomic swap support for nearly 2 years, thanks to the pioneering work of h4sh3d on Monero atomic swaps, there are still very few DEXs around that support Monero, and even less so with a proper user interface and easy-to-use process. Fortunately, BasicSwap comes in with full support for Monero trading pairs and a fully-integrated and user-friendly interface. That means you can trade one of the world’s most anonymous cryptocurrencies with atomic swap compatible assets such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Namecoin, and Particl. And you don’t even have to bother with security deposits or swap moderators!

Of course, BasicSwap will be of great benefit to the Particl community moving forward. Indeed, it will be an integral part of the ecosystem as it is about to begin an important evolutionary phase in which any current and future dApp of the Particl ecosystem (and third-party apps and services as well) that requires swapping will be able to make use of the BasicSwap protocol through its module. This will make Particl’s applications more accessible and inclusive to many communities, extending their use-cases beyond Particl’s own community. More details on this upcoming major evolutionary phase coming shortly on Particl News. As always, stay tuned!

BasicSwap, in and of itself, doesn’t have a for-profit model. The protocol was originally meant to provide functionality and exposure for PART, but rapidly grew outside of that scope. That’s very important because it now serves as both a trading platform and swapping protocol with a much more extensive mission is bringing fairness, accessibility, and openness back into the act of trading cryptocurrencies.

Because it is a protocol, it can, and eventually will, provide swap functionality to other dApps, third-party platforms and services, or even other DEXs built on top of it. But to accomplish this effectively, BasicSwap must remain free-to-use at the protocol level.

As we will soon enter a major evolutionary phase for the Particl ecosystem, the BasicSwap protocol will power all sorts of dApps, modules, and swap services that will be able to be monetized to the benefit of the network.

Although BasicSwap is a standalone product and not yet part of Particl Desktop, it is an integral and critical component of Particl’s privacy-first ecosystem.

As such, its development is funded by the team’s development budget, which is obtained through community-approved claims from the network’s decentralized treasury system (1, 2).

Additionally, we’ve received a generous donation from a private individual specifically for the development of BasicSwap as a core component of the Particl ecosystem. We want to take this opportunity to thank this individual who’d rather remain anonymous. Your donation is incredibly important to us and for the Particl mission. We are immensely and forever grateful for your selfless act.

BasicSwap is entirely decentralized, meaning that no one and everyone “runs” the service. There is no central party, server, or middleman involved in any single part of the process, and you never need to give access to your keys to anybody or any smart-contract (which could get exploited).

All of these safety measures are baked into the atomic swap protocol. Atomic swaps are, by design, condition, and time-based steps that can only be progressed when certain conditions (communicated between two chains through the use of Particl’s SMSG) are met. Should a condition not be met, for example if the other participant doesn’t keep their end of the deal, then the coins committed to the swaps are refunded to their respective owners.

However, because the process of atomically swapping assets is automated by the SMSG network, this should not happen unless one of the participants willingly goes out of their way to obstruct the process, in which case the coins committed by the other participant would simply be refunded to them.

You can read more on atomic swaps here.

BasicSwap is developed and released by the Particl team. Since the project’s inception in 2017, the team has released numerous breakthrough products and deliverables, many of which are “crypto firsts”. This includes, but isn’t limited to, their own native cryptocurrency based on the most recent Bitcoin codebase, including of course Segwit, Lightning Network, and all the recent upgrades to Bitcoin, but to which was also added many privacy improvements such as RingCT, CT, stealth addresses, and bulletproofs range proofs.

The team has also released its own proof-of-stake protocol (PPoS) which had the first iteration of a cold staking protocol in the blockchain space back in 2017. Cold staking pools followed shortly after.

Additionally, the team released the groundbreaking Particl Marketplace dApp, a decentralized, privacy-first, and unrestricted two-sided marketplace application that lets you buy and sell anything online without middlemen, which is powered by the project’s very own SecureMessaging network (SMSG), a peer-to-peer mixnet that lets two parties exchange messages and data in complete and total anonymity. More recently, Particl was one of the first projects after Bitcoin to integrate Taproot into its codebase.

The Particl team has demonstrated its commitment to privacy, security, and hard work throughout the years, which is demonstrated by its constant high ranking within Github ranking websites. BasicSwap follows the same ethics and ethos.

BasicSwap is at the very end of its closed beta phase and will enter its final testing round within a few days. Once that is complete, its open beta phase will start where anyone will be able to use it on mainnet.

If you’d like to be notified as soon as possible of when that happens, then make sure to subscribe to the Particl newsletter. We’ll be sure to send you an email as soon as it's ready to launch!

If that’s crossing your mind, then we’re delighted that you feel this way about BasicSwap and are in it with us for this wonderful journey of cutting off the middlemen and reasserting our rights to a free and private financial system.

If you’d like to donate, then by all means contact the Particl team at hello@particl.io and we’ll make a deposit address available to you in the cryptocurrency of your choosing (ideally, one available on BasicSwap 😉)

No, this is not possible. BasicSwap uses the atomic swap technology that lets you swap assets in your possession for other assets.

Absolutely, although not at this present time. With BasicSwap’s future modular approach, it’ll be easy to integrate the protocol into web gateways, third-party applications (i.e., a cryptocurrency wallet), or even within a mobile application. However, that’s planned for later during this beta phase.

That depends on your internet connection speed and whether or not you choose to “fast sync” the Bitcoin blockchain. That’s because BasicSwap works using full nodes and, as you probably already know, it takes quite some time to sync the Bitcoin in full.

With that in mind, it should take you roughly 10 to 30 minutes to install and build BasicSwap, depending on how used you are to this kind of process. Then, syncing the blockchains is entirely dependent on your internet connection, taking roughly 60 minutes on average with a fast connection and the “fast sync” option.

The good news is that, once BasicSwap is installed and running, you can let the blockchains sync in the background.

Note that Monero is integrated with its bootstrapping functionality, meaning that, while it syncs, it connects to a public node and lets you use it through that. That means you can swap Monero even if it’s not fully synced. Once the node is done syncing, the daemon will automatically switch to the local version instead of the public node.

This is entirely dependent on the block time of the coins you’re swapping. For example, it takes Bitcoin, on average, 10 minutes for one block to sync. Particl, on the other hand, takes 2 minutes, just like Monero. And so, swapping Bitcoin for Monero should take slightly longer than swapping Particl for Monero.

As an example, a Bitcoin to Monero swap takes on average 30 minutes for the whole process to complete. Note that, once a swap is initiated, everything happens in the background and you don’t need to complete any manual steps. Just initiate the swap and wait for it to complete; you can track the progress right from inside the client.