Introduction
I heard of SideSwap on a the Tales from the Crypt podcast. The co-host Matt Odell suggested Bitcoiners to become familiar with the Liquid Sidechain. The easiest way to do this was to download SideSwap. If you are unfamiliar with the Liquid Sidechain and Liquid Bitcoin please do your research here. But in summary, major advantages of using the Liquid Sidechain are low transaction fees, quicker confirmations, ( I believe blocks are found every 2 minutes versus every 10 for Bitcoin) and confidential transactions. But the trade off for these features is a more centralized blockchain that is controlled by a federation. Matt suggested Bitcoiners to send over some sats peg-in and test it out. Me being the hobbyist I am, I decided to dive in.
SideSwap came out about 7 months ago. Per the Apple Store version history the app is currently on version 1.0.12. I can honestly say I didn’t notice the version updates to often. The only one I really noticed is the ability to add Liquid tokens and a market token swaps including stablecoins. Below is my honest review of the app.
To get to my final thoughts please scroll down to the TL:DR section. There you will find my final thoughts and my rankings.
Where to find it?
Finding this app is as simple as it gets. Navigate to the Apple App Store and search SideSwap
As you can see this is app is very obscure as the Liquid Sidechain is still trying to find a legitimate use case. But the low number of downloads doesn’t make it difficult to find. Since I am in North America I am unsure if this app is available in international markets. I would assume yes but I am unable to confirm this at the time of this writing.
After you have found and downloaded the app lets navigate around and see what SideSwap has to offer.
Getting Started
Home Screen:
When you first open the app it will prompt you to create a new Bitcoin Wallet or to import a wallet from an existing mnemonic 12 or 24 word seed phrase. Then you will be able to choose your Once you create your wallet you are brought to the home screen.
This screen here is pretty self explanatory. Very easy to use and navigate lets go though each of the buttons so you can get a feel for the app itself.
Home Screen Buttons
Settings:
The top right is the classic symbol for settings. Click on it and the following screen pops up.
Here you have your main core functions for the app. The recovery phrase for the wallet (KEEP THESE SAFE FROM VIEW! THESE WORDS WILL GRANT ACCESS TO YOUR WALLET TO ANYONE THAT HAS/KNOWS THEM)
About us which shows the following:
Each of these links have information about the app and where to get help if needed. Pretty standard stuff. I never used this tab. I do follow them on Twitter but they aren’t to active with only 37 tweets as of the writing of this article. I clicked on the telegram and they have about 207 members and 17 online. Again I don’t think this is an active app due to the low number of reviews and downloads but the reference information is here for easy location and access. Great job by the development team to build this right into the app.
Now jumping back to the main setting screen biometric is the toggle to use Apple’s FaceID if you would like. A true cypherpunk would never use such a tool but I am lazy and it gives me a false sense of security so I keep it on.
And lastly we have the network access menu
SideSwap and Blockstream are selected with a check mark and if you select custom you see the screen on the right. I am not 100% sure what these are and how they impact my app but to date i have always used the default SideSwap and had no issues with the app.
The last and final button on the setting tab is to delete your wallet.
Receive, QR Code, and Send
While the logo looks like a button it is just an aesthetic which takes us. the next buttons on the home screen. Receive, QR Code and Send,
The receive screen is pretty standard. It displays a QR code for easy scanning and a Liquid address you can send all of your Liquid assets to. The copy and share buttons allow easy duplication of the address string. The address is an 83 character string that is a mix to numbers and letters both lowercase and uppercase. When sending to his address the transaction is confidential which is one of the use cases for using the Liquid Sidechain.
The QR code screen opens up your camera and allows you to scan a QR code.
The Send screen allows you to paste an address and to the far right (not shown in the picture) a QR code icon is present to allow the user to scan the address you are sending a transaction too.
With the main on screen buttons navigated we will now turn our attention to the lower menu items
Locked Menu Items:
Accounts
The first item we will explore is the accounts button (circled in red above). Once you click on it you are taken to the screen below
As shown above this screen will show all the assets that are currently in your wallet. The first is your Liquid Bitcoin ledger. It is shown in BTC denomination and the USD equivalent right under it. The next is your Liquid Tether balance. And last is my NFT token that I purchased from Raretoshi.
After looking over your assets you notice two buttons in the top right. The first. that looks like a document with an arrow through it is a data export feature. This will export all the transactions you made within your SideSwap app.
The next button with lines and dots is an asset list:
The picture above is list of all the assets my SideSwap app has knowledge of. As soon as a new token/asset is sent to your SidSwap address it will show up here. The toggle button allows you to filter which assets will be displayed in the account screen. For my wallet I purchased the Blockstream tokens to test my SideSwap wallet. Soon after I bought the tokens they showed up in my wallet after 1 confirmation of the Liquid Sidechain. I like the way the developers make this user experience/interface very easy and intuitive. Since I don’t have these tokens anymore I am able to toggle them off. The search bar is pretty self explanatory. If an asset isn’t showing up you can try to search for it. I haven’t had to use this yet.
Markets
After reviewing your accounts you can access the markets. SideSwap added this menu item after I been using the app for some time. This allows users of SideSwap to list assets and tokens for sale and users to by them sort of like a decentralized exchange. When the menu item first came available users listed tokens. The only ones I ever saw were the Blockstream Jade and Blockstream Webcam tokens. These tokens can be used at the Blockstream store for the Jade and Webcam accordingly. Lets navigate the markets menu item and see what it has to offer.
When you first click on the markets menu item you see the following screen:
The first page allows you to create an order along with other menu items for token market and swap market. For the purpose of this medium article lets create a new token order.
After you hit Create Order the following screen is shown:
The down arrow can be selected for the asset you wish to sell that you have in your SideSwap wallet for this example I chose USD Liquid Tether. Toggling between Limit and Tracking changes the percentages on the slide bar from 1% to 3% meaning I can sell my USD Liquid Tether for a premium of. 1% and 3% respectively. So for this example I am going to sell my USD Liquid Tether at a 3% discount and hit continue.
After hitting continue the following screen is shown:
As you can see above you get a nice summary of the order you are about to place. One of the big benefits of using Liquid is shown with the cheap 500 sat Liquid Bitcoin mining fee. So someone can buy this $6.18 worth of USD Liquid Tether for $5.73 in Liquid Bitcoin through SideSwap with no other third party/order book needed. So after I create my order (and Iphone confirms my Identity) the following screen is shown:
And now my order is live for all to see in SideSwap
The next upper tab Token Market displays all the tokens that are available for buying and selling. During my short time of using SideSwap I have yet to see many tokens/assets listed here. Maybe after hyperbitcoinization and Liquid Sidechain becomes a fixture of the new digital finance revolution we will see thousands of tokens listed here but for today it is as blank as it looks in the screen cap below.
Lastly for the Markets menu bar is Swap market. This tab shows the index price of USD Liquid Tether (aka the Spot price of BTC) and the current bid/offers that are active within SideSwap.
This complete the review of the Markets menu bar item. Lastly we will review how to use the Swap menu bar item.
Swap
Now we get to the most critical feature of SideSwap, the actual Swap menu item. When you click on the menu item the following screen is shown:
At first look SideSwap gives you the option to do a swap of Liquid Bitcoin for Liquid Tether or Euro. I have used this function very easily. When you enter in a swap it usually confirms in under a minute and you can send that swap immediately. It is very seamless but the options are very limited at the moment. As Liquid Bitcoin gains more adoption I am sure SideSwap will add more assets to swap with.
The next menu item at the top -Peg-In/Out make acquiring Liquid Bitcoin very easy. When you click on the menu item it looks like this:
At the top you can choose which asset you wish to send into SideSwap. The selections are Bitcoin and Liquid Bitcoin. In the middle you see the conversion rate for making the swap and lastly you see what asset you will receive.
Once you make your selection you tap Peg-In and the following is shown
SideSwap gives you a Bitcoin address and the address of your SideSwap wallet. Once you send Bitcoin to the Bitcoin address the Sideswap app will detect a Peg-In transaction and assign it a transaction ID. In my experience Peg-In time can be about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Once finished the Liquid Bitcoin is added to your assets and the process is complete.
To Peg-Out you have to switch your asset to Liquid Bitcoin as you see below :
The Bitcoin address you provide above is where the Bitcoin will be sent once you have completed the Peg-Out process of Liquid Bitcoin. The fee suggestion can be changed to allow the user to pay the cheapest fee. I have yet to use this option as I never needed to Peg-Out but the process appears to be very easy.
Challenges/Issues
When you first click on the app it does take some time for it to load. One time the app was stuck loading. I was a little paranoid that my assets were lost for good but after killing the app and restarting it a few times it finally loaded up. I am unsure as to what caused this to happen but ever since then the app has word great. This is the only issue I have add with SideSwap to date.
Conclusion
SideSwap is a really easy way for normal people to access Liquid Bitcoin and become familiar with the Liquid Sidechain. I would caution anyone from putting Bitcoin into Sideswap due to the Federation. Since you are trusting the Federation which could be easily captured since membership is very centralized versus Bitcoin.
The uses cases for SideSwap are very small. I use it to play around with the NFT site Raretoshi, and to get quick access to Liquid Tether to provide cheap loans here.
TL : DR
SideSwap is a great application to use if you wish to gain access to Liquid Sidechain. Not much activity/liquidity is on the application but it is a nice iOS wallet that you can hold all of your Liquid Tokens on and sell if you so wish.
Below are my overall rankings.
(A = Outstanding, B = Very Good, C = Satisfactory , D = Poor, F = Fail)
Easy to locate — — > A
User Interface — — -> A
User Experience — — -> A
Stability — — - > A
Relevance — — — > F
Tech Support — -> (No basis to judge)
Overall — -> B
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! If you have any questions please drop a comment or DM me on Twitter I am willing to help where ever I can.
Hobbyist Out!
