Research corpus InteroperabilityBLC-STUDY-0082

Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps

A swap across ledgers where either every transfer completes or none does, using hash locks and time locks. There is no custodian in the paper. A party can still walk away and leave the other waiting.

Official external source only
Design paper
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Record

Authors: Maurice Herlihy
Date: 2018
Publisher: Maurice Herlihy
Version: Source cited by the 2018 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.
Document ID: BLC-STUDY-0082
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.

Direct answer

A swap across ledgers where either every transfer completes or none does, using hash locks and time locks. There is no custodian in the paper. A party can still walk away and leave the other waiting.

Where to read

Official source — arXiv:1801.09515
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.

Full text

Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.

What changed

The study separates the text from later network behaviour. This bibliographic page does not repeat that essay.

Relationships

Canonical readingAtomic swaps study
Related paperLightning
Related paperSprites
Related paperIBC

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Herlihy, M. (2018). Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps. Maurice Herlihy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09515

BibTeX

@techreport{atomicswaps2018,
  title = {Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps},
  author = {Maurice Herlihy},
  year = {2018},
  institution = {Maurice Herlihy},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09515},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/atomic-swaps}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps
AU  - Maurice Herlihy
PY  - 2018
PB  - Maurice Herlihy
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09515
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-STUDY-0082",
    "title": "Atomic Cross-Chain Swaps",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Maurice Herlihy"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2018
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Maurice Herlihy",
    "URL": "https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09515",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

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Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections