Atomicity Partition: Decentralized Exchange
The Atomicity Partition is not yet implemented. Support for this partition will be added in later Alphabill releases.
In a sharded blockchain system, it is useful to provide native support for atomic transactions. These can be in the form of multi-token atomic transfers or atomic swaps between different token types (for example, for delivery versus payment where assets are exchanged for currency).
In a single machine model, this is straightforward; smart contracts such as Uniswap have access to the entire global state and can ensure atomicity—either the contract succeeds and multiple tokens are swapped, or the contract fails and no ownership is changed. In Uniswap, the smart contract provides both exchange and settlement services—these aspects of trading are typically separated in traditional financial applications for reasons of scalability and specialization.
In Alphabill, a dedicated atomicity partition provides this functionality, allowing decentralized exchanges to be separate from the settlement operations.