World’s Easiest Onramp for Crypto Beginners: From EUR in Your Bank Account to BTC or NIM in “Your-Keys-Your-Coins” Wallet in Under 5 Minutes

A handshake between traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi) is finally happening! Nimiq – a non-profit and open source blockchain project has enabled Atomic Swaps for fiat and cryptocurrencies. The recent public beta launch of Nimiq’s OASIS (Open Asset Swap Interaction Scheme) marks the milestone event and allows users to go  from money in their bank account to crypto in their self-custodial wallet in less than 5 minutes!

With OASIS, Nimiq has adopted the tried and tested DeFi concepts of Atomic Swaps and Hashed Timelock Contracts (HTLC) to handle off-chain assets, thereby creating a bridge between two different financial worlds. The OASIS protocol simulates off-chain assets to behave like blockchain tokens, making them programmable. The project has chosen EUR as the first off chain asset and has partnered with the German TEN31 Bank to make it possible.

The banking partnership enables OASIS Protocol to create a smart contract that interacts with the SEPA Instant system. Meanwhile, smart contracts for cryptocurrencies are created on their respective blockchains. With these two sets of smart contracts in place, a swap can be initiated to facilitate noncustodial, verifiable, peer-to-peer exchange of assets. Currently, the OASIS Protocol only supports the purchase of BTC and NIM with EUR from any SEPA Instant capable bank accounts, with more assets to be added soon.

Buy BTC and NIM with EUR on Nimiq OASIS

Nimiq is on a mission to make cryptocurrencies accessible to everyone. To do that, it is relentlessly working on simplifying most of the crypto related processes. The introduction of Nimiq OASIS is a huge step in that direction. The entire Nimiq ecosystem is designed to work within a web browser on any device with an internet connection.

Anyone can use Nimiq OASIS irrespective of their prior experience with cryptocurrencies by following a few simple steps. They just have to visit the webapp site wallet.nimiq.com and create an account by choosing an avatar which represents their self-custodial wallet address. Once the password is set and the account created, they can download the login file that contains the cryptographic key for future access to their account from any other browser instance or device.

After logging in, they can select Buy NIM and BTC option, pick Bank Transfer as the mode of payment to establish an Atomic Swap like connection. They can select bank name or enter the BIC of their SEPA Instant enabled bank, followed by the amount of cryptocurrency they wish to purchase and initiate the transaction. The fiat end of the smart contract will be filled by the executed SEPA Instant transaction while Nimiq’s Fastspot liquidity service takes care of the crypto end of things by transferring the requested number of tokens. After both contracts are fulfilled, OASIS will initiate a swap and the user will receive the purchased crypto in their wallet.

OASIS HTLC necessitates the contract to be fulfilled within 90 minutes of execution, failing which the funds transferred to respective contracts will be reversed, thereby eliminating counterparty risk.

Nimiq is on a Roll

With the integration of Nimiq OASIS into the Nimiq Wallet, it enables up to 350 million users in Europe to onboard effortlessly from fiat into crypto without personal registration and nothing more than a SEPA bank account. Armed with a proven technology solution, Nimiq intends to expand the applications of OASIS protocol to other wallets and assets. In the near future, OASIS powered widgets and APIs will be made available for enabling atomic swapping, buying and selling of any product. It will also act as a payment processor for businesses and ecommerce platforms by enabling them to accept crypto payments from their customers and receive fiat into their account as settlement.

Meanwhile, the Nimiq project continues to optimize crypto payments by upgrading their original Proof-of-Work chain to their evolved, state of the art Proof-of-Stake chain that pushes the theoretical performance limits of single chain protocols.