Trustless Swaps Across Bitcoin Layers | Walter Maffione SLP772

Stephan Livera (0:00)

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me on the show today is Walter Maffione, CEO and founder or co-founder of KaleidoSwap, which is a swapping platform. Welcome to the show, Walter.

Walter Maffione (0:11)

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Stephan Livera (0:13)

So, Walter, tell us a bit about yourself. I know you have a little bit of a background, but obviously you're a young guy. People might not have heard of you.

Walter Maffione (0:19)

Sure. So I'm a software engineer. I had a few years of experience on the iField, and then I found Bitcoin a few years ago. And then three years ago I decided to work on KaleidoSwap, that basically is our DAX on the Lightning Network. So we're going to offer swaps on the Lightning Network.

Stephan Livera (0:38)

Yeah. And as I understand, you started more on the RGB side, as in KaleidoSwap started on the RGB side, but now you're going to expand it out. Talk to us a bit about that. Which layers are you going to offer?

Walter Maffione (0:49)

Sure. So basically, we started with RGB layer. So we started with the idea to offer swaps around RGB.

But then we decided that probably was make sense to expand to other layers on lightning and on the Bitcoin layers. And so basically, right now, we are building this swap provider, also connecting lightning to liquid, to arcade, to Taproot Assets, and maybe other arcs that can come out later. And so the idea here is to have lightning as the common rails between any of these layers on Bitcoin. And so we're going to offer swaps of Bitcoin, but also other assets like Stablecoins, or in the future, for example, real-world assets.

Stephan Livera (1:31)

Interesting. And so, yeah, just for listeners who are maybe a bit newer or trying to learn a bit more, what's going on here is there are different, let's call it last mile technologies that people are using. And some of them might be on liquid and arc and spark and lightning.

And so some of these things, maybe they might be used in the background by the wallet or the app provider. But the end user doesn't have to know. He just kind of clicks a button, hits send, hits receive. He doesn't really think about it too much. Can you talk to us a bit about that? From your perspective on KaleidoSwap, do you see it being like that where maybe a lot of the businesses or like developers and APIs will kind of use you guys and then the end users will kind of use you, but they don't actually know they're using you?

Walter Maffione (2:14)

Yeah, sure. So basically we are building a full infrastructure here. So we're going to have our own lighting service provider, so our own LSB that we're going to offer lighting channels and liquidity on lighting in general as normal LSB.

And on top of that, we're going to run our own swap provider. And here basically we're going to have our own liquidity for liquid, for arcade, and for other layers. And you can interact with our swap provider in different ways. So the first way will be a web application similar for what Bodz was doing. So there will be a web app where people can go there, create the swap they want to do, pay and receive immediately with an atomic swap, the asset they want to receive. But the other way to interact with us is by using our SDK. So we have our own SDK where wallet providers or exchange or any other people interested in implementing swaps, can just use the SDK and offer the user connection with other layers. So for example, if you don't want to support stable coins, for example, but the merchant will accept stable coins, a user or a wallet developer can implement our SDK, and people that just want to pay on Bitcoin can immediately pay the invoice, for example, for USDT on Lightning, but just by paying on Bitcoin by using our SDK. So there are different ways to implement and to connect to our swap provider.

Stephan Livera (3:42)

Yeah, gotcha. So as I read it then, like you said, there may be different uses where, let's say, a merchant wants to take payment, and maybe that merchant, he has fiat bills to pay. So he wants to take stable coin, but the Bitcoin payer wants to pay with Lightning or Bitcoin. So it's like Bitcoin and Lightning in, and then maybe Tether or USDT or some stable coin out in RGB, Liquid, Taproot Assets, etc. So that's one of the models. Then I guess the other common model might be some of these wallets or apps that want to have a unified balance. They just want to show you one balance. They don't want to confuse the user with like, here's your liquid balance, here's your this and that. They just want to have one balance, and you can just pay or receive into that.