Paper 2025/1086

Fairness in the Wild: Secure Atomic Swap with External Incentives

Abstract

Atomic swaps enable asset exchanges across blockchains without relying on trusted intermediaries, and are a key component of decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems. Recently, Chung, Masserova, Shi, and Thyagarajan introduced Rapidash (Financial Cryptography 2025), an atomic swap protocol that remains incentive compatible under user-miner collusion, by ensuring that the honest strategy forms a coalition-resistant Nash equilibrium. However, their model assumes a closed system where players act solely based on internal protocol incentives. In practice, participants may be influenced by external incentives such as off-chain rewards or adversarial bribes, which can undermine such equilibrium guarantees. In this work, we introduce a new game-theoretic notion, bounded maximin fairness, which ensures that honest participants remain protected against rational adversaries with arbitrary but bounded external incentives. We construct an atomic swap protocol that satisfies this notion, while preserving the equilibrium properties of prior work in the absence of external influence. As we show, our protocol is easy to implement and can be instantiated even in Bitcoin’s limited scripting language.