This month marks my 8th anniversary working on non-custodial financial products on #Bitcoin. - 2017 I started looking into cross-chain atomic swaps, particularly with Lightning. I remember looking into Raiden on Eth back then to do swaps between LN and Eth... the limiting factor initially was actually LN which didn't support HODL invoices. I even wrote a paper about AODV routing... not gonna link this as it is a bit embarrassing 😅 - 2018 we built (the first) atomic swap between ERC20 tokens and Lightning, this was pretty cool back then (github.com/comit-network/com…) - 2019 After focusing on ETH and BTC for a long time I wanted to push privacy forward. Afaik we were the first one doing Grin<>BTC atomic swaps (github.com/comit-network/gri…) - 2020 It was clear Grin is not going anywhere, so we focused on XMR<>BTC. When we launched the swapping tool we allegedly moved the price by 20%😅(cointelegraph.com/news/moner…). Today our tool is still being maintained by the XMR community (github.com/UnstoppableSwap/c…) which makes me super proud. Even Samurai Wallet started integrating it: news.bitcoin.com/samourai-wa… The cool thing about this was that we used adaptor signatures to do cross-chain atomic swaps. Those who know, Monero uses a different curve, so this was quite advanced math - math we could not have done without the talented @LLFOURN. We even found a "bug" in Monero, which basically made it impossible to build L2s on Monero due to the inability to chain un-confirmed transactions. - 2020 We wanted to build an cross-chain dex aggregators with the talented team of @Boltzhq and @tierotiero - 2020 We then started looking into Liquid and how to build unstoppable trading experience on Liquid: comit.network/blog/2020/11/2… - 2021 We built the first lending product: borrowing without a middle man using transaction coventants (OP_CAT + OP_CSFS) - again - on Liquid: comit.network/blog/2021/03/3… We even built a browser extension for this in @rustlang (how painful 😅) github.com/comit-network/wav… As you can tell, we really thought Liquid was cool, but after building the PoCs we learned that no-one was using Liquid. Maybe now is the time for a revival? :D - 2021 - End of 2021 we pivoted into non-custodial derivatives using #DLCs: Project Itchysats (@rot13maxi surely remembers). Itchysats later became @get10101. The mission was simple: enable users to trade without counterparty risk - like Bitmex - just non-custodial. Itchysats was among the first apps to launch on @umbrel and was also available on @RaspiBlitz and @start9labs - back then people were really pushing for running your own (LN) nodes :) - 2022-2024 was the time of @get10101, we brought DLCs to Lightning, launched worlds first non-custodial synthetic stable coin and enabled thousands of users to bet on the bitcoin price without having to give up custody over the coins. Those who follow me for a while, know that this unfortunately did not work out - we didn't get the traction we wanted. - 2024+ we launched @lendasat, borrowing without counterparty risk. Everything we learned over the last years led to this: adaptor signatures, #DLCs, cross-chain atomic swaps using HTCLs, PTLCs, derivatives trading, building on Liquid, building on Ark ... and what not. While I really wished that by now we had non-custodial DEXes on Bitcoin, I couldn't be more bullish on the current development in this space. With non-custodial @lightning being the very fabric connecting pretty much everything related to Bitcoin and the different Ark implementations such as from @ArkLabsHQ and @secondhq , I'm certain we will see non-custodial DeFi on Bitcoin - with UX ready for the masses. With @lendasat we are continuing our mission of challenging the state of the art and pushing self-sovereign finance on Bitcoin. I will not rest until everyone has the option to transact, trade, borrow or lend in a self-sovereign and self-custodial way! This is how bitcoin is meant to be!