A Bridge Between Different Cryptocurrencies

The team: Zeta Avarikioti, Lukas Aumayr, Giulia Scaffino, Matteo Maffei How can you exchange one cryptocurrency for another? Until now, you had to either trust large crypto providers or limit yourself to simple currency swaps. TU Wien has now developed a decentralised protocol which can be used to efficiently encode new exciting financial instruments. Bitcoin is probably the best-known cryptocurrency in the world today - but there are many others, each implementing and offering different technical features. For exchanging a cryptocurrency for another, so-called "bridges" are used - often provided by companies that hold large sums of different cryptocurrencies and offer to exchange them. However, this has repeatedly led to security problems and spectacular criminal cases - cryptocurrencies worth billions of euros have been stolen in the process. A novel protocol has now been developed at TU Wien that enables the exchange of one cryptocurrency for another in an efficient and secure manner - and in a completely decentralised way, without having to use a large crypto-depot of commercial providers. "Glimpse" is the name of the new protocol, which is now expected to open up entirely new options for the crypto world.