The privacy fans in the crypto community are in for a treat. The famed Samourai Wallet has decided to join the Haveno Decentralized Exchange (DEX) project. Samourai Wallet announced on April 30 that it was sponsoring the Haveno project with a 0.18 BTC grant. Haveno is a P2P and escrow-based DEX project. It runs on top of Monero and Tor, forking the Bisq technology. It aims to facilitate Monero XMR exchange with other cryptocurrencies (primarily Bitcoin).
We're glad to be the first sponsor of the important Haveno-DEX, which is a fork of Bisq (without plans for the insidious custodial Liquid layer) with a 0.18 BTC grant.
A privacy first, KYC-free on/off ramp is essential for privacy seeking bitcoin users https://t.co/JLFNKtiIcd
Samourai Wallet is essentially a Bitcoin privacy-focused hard wallet. It’s reasonable to assume that Haveno might be integrated into the wallet itself, in the future. Such integration would allow Bitcoin – Monero swaps, without relying on a custodial third party and in a decentralized manner. Additionally, it is very necessary to break the links, which come to existence when transferring BTCs over the blockchain, similarly to Tornado Cash. Bitcoin transactions, by default, aren’t private.
You may be asking yourself why we are supporting this project over Bisq? The operator of Bisq has crossed red-lines by proclaiming Liquid will be used as the "base layer" – Liquid is a custodial solution and we believe this is the first step towards KYC capture of the platform. pic.twitter.com/JF0Ig3IPl6
Bisq has a fundamental flaw. It’s built on top of Bitcoin, which has an open and accessible blockchain ledger. The transaction histories are visible and traceable. Hence, Samourai Wallet needs a better solution to enhance Bitcoin privacy further. The Haveno fork would mitigate these issues since the Monero ledger blurs all transactions by default and allow native private swaps between Monero and Bitcoin.
It would be a KYC-free protocol, which would allow decentralized trading. The official Twitter handle of Samourai wallet explained their decision to prefer Haveno over Bisq because the latter has decided to rely on custodial and centralized Liquid federated side-chain and hence unreliable.