Two people can now trade assets across different blockchains using a trustless lottery that guarantees fair odds without a middleman.
Probabilistic atomic swaps enable cross-chain exchanges that function like a verifiable gamble or a randomized allocation. Previously, blockchain swaps were all-or-nothing, requiring both parties to fulfill the entire trade at once. This new cryptographic primitive allows for partial or odds-based trades that remain secure and decentralized. It opens up a new world of trustless gambling and randomized asset distribution between ecosystems like Bitcoin and Ethereum. This technology makes it possible to build complex financial games that are mathematically guaranteed to be fair.
Probabilistic Atomic Swaps for Bitcoin and Friends
arXiv · 2605.04975
Atomic swaps are a fundamental primitive for the trustless exchange of digital assets across blockchains: they guarantee that either both parties receive the agreed assets or neither party transfers. While this all-or-nothing guarantee is powerful, it also imposes an inherent determinism that rules out exchanges whose intended outcome is probabilistic. As a result, existing atomic swaps cannot realize trustless exchanges in which one party pays for a fixed chance of receiving a larger asset or r