Are atomic transactions a good idea?

[frangio]

Atomic swaps are a very useful primitive. As for how they can be implemented, here is an ongoing discussion about an implementation that could be included in OpenZeppelin:

Suggestion to include Hashed Timelock Contract

I would like to propose to include a Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) for ERC20 tokens and one for ERC721 tokens in OpenZeppelin, to support atomic swaps between these types of tokens. Sample implementations can be found here https://github.com/kaleido-io/token-sample-htlc (which is forked and enhanced from Chris Hatch). this contract is for consumers or organizations who want to trade tokens but do not want to use a 3rd party centralized component that they must trust this implementation u…