There's two distinct concepts that are often confused: atomic swaps and trustless crosschain transfers.
Atomic swap technology is well-established and relatively simple to implement (it was implemented in BitShares for instance). You can find more about the tech here. But as the BitShares guys found (well, I tried to tell them before they implemented it), it's not really the technology they were looking for.
What people are usually looking for is a trustless way to transfer a coin back and forth between blockchain networks. Atomic swaps don't achieve this, because they don't provide a mechanism to peg the value between coins on each network.
Trustless crosschain transfer is a much more difficult problem, although there are feasible solutions. We did some research into this area many years ago and had what I believe were viable ideas for it, and it is quite likely we might revisit the ideas again. But it's not something I'm planning for hardfork 25.
There's two distinct concepts that are often confused: atomic swaps and trustless crosschain transfers.
Atomic swap technology is well-established and relatively simple to implement (it was implemented in BitShares for instance). You can find more about the tech here. But as the BitShares guys found (well, I tried to tell them before they implemented it), it's not really the technology they were looking for.
What people are usually looking for is a trustless way to transfer a coin back and forth between blockchain networks. Atomic swaps don't achieve this, because they don't provide a mechanism to peg the value between coins on each network.
Trustless crosschain transfer is a much more difficult problem, although there are feasible solutions. We did some research into this area many years ago and had what I believe were viable ideas for it, and it is quite likely we might revisit the ideas again. But it's not something I'm planning for hardfork 25.