Bitcoin and ethereum atomic swap code now open source,

A team of cryptocurrency startup developers is open-sourcing technology that enables trustless trading between the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains.

Now available on GitHub, the code has already been used to execute what startup Altcoin Exchange claims is the first so-called "atomic swap" between the largest cryptocurrencies by market value. As a result of the release, a now larger community of developers can play around with and build on top of the code.

For example, using Altcoin Exchange's tech, developers can lock ether tokens in an ethereum smart contract that specifies the funds will only be sent if an equal amount of bitcoin is sent to a bitcoin address during a specific time window.

At a high level, that's how the developer team at Altcoin Exchange executed the trade (the ethereum code for the transfer can be viewed on the ethereum block explorer Etherscan), which shows how 0.12345 ether was traded for 0.12345 bitcoin.

But while that might seem experimental or complex, developers instead see the milestone as another step toward the tangible goal of replacing centralized cryptocurrency exchanges with the ability to swap assets directly between blockchains.