Shapeshift to Pioneer Cross-Chain Trading With THORChain

ShapeShift users can now swap Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Litecoin directly across their respective blockchains is now possible for the first time ever.

A First From ShapeShift’s DEX

Swapping assets between different blockchains have been a much-requested feature of DeFi, which, so far, had not seen much progress. Vitalik Buterin himself tweeted in March 2020 about the necessity to allow users to trade between the two most important blockchains.

We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It’s embarrassing that we still can’t easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 24, 2020

This is now possible on ShapeShift, a new decentralized exchange led by crypto pioneer Erik Vorhees.

Using THORChain’s technology, users will be able to trade native Bitcoin with Litecoin and Ethereum on Shapeshift’s mobile platform. Support for the web version of ShapeShift should arrive soon after. While the company founded in 2014 is one of the oldest in crypto, it only recently became a decentralized exchange in January of this year.

THORChain is a community-led project founded in 2018 dedicated to allowing a trustless, non-custodial exchange of tokens across blockchains.

Behold… this has never been done before.

Native (unwrapped) #Ethereum in

Native (unwrapped) #Bitcoin out

$5,000 trade
No intermediary
No custody
No KYC@ShapeShift_io today launched decentralized cross-chain trading, by integrating @THORChain (which also launched today) pic.twitter.com/KXe9sQ0uw0

— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) April 13, 2021

Disclaimer: The author held BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.