Abstract
The Arwen Trading Protocols are layer-two blockchain protocols for traders to securely trade cryptocurrencies at a centralized exchange, without ceding custody of their coins to the exchange. Before trading begins, traders deposit their coins in an on-blockchain escrow where the agent of escrow is the blockchain itself. Each trade is backed by the coins locked in escrow. Each trade is fast, because it happens off-blockchain, and secure, because atomic swaps prevent even a hacked exchange from taking custody of a trader’s coins. Arwen is designed to work even with the “lowest common denominator” of blockchains—namely Bitcoin-derived coins without SegWit support. As a result, Arwen supports essentially all “Bitcoin-derived” coins e.g., BTC, LTC, BCH, ZEC, as well as Ethereum. Our protocols support Limit and RFQ order types, we implemented our RFQ protocol and it is available for use at arwen.io.
Major contributions to the design of these protocols were made by James Dalessandro, Ezequiel Gomes Perez, Haydn Kennedy, Yuval Marcus, Chet Powers, Omar Sagga, Aleksander Skjolsvik and Scott Sigel.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Underscore VC, Digital Garage, Notation, United Bitcoiners, Highland Capital Partners, and the Cybersecurity Factory for their support of Arwen. We also acknowledge Patrick McCorry, Ben Jones, David Vorick and our anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.
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Heilman, E., Lipmann, S., Goldberg, S. (2020). The Arwen Trading Protocols. In: Bonneau, J., Heninger, N. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12059. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51280-4_10
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