ETH co-founder releases new version of Bitcoin client, the first step towards multi-chain interoperability?

Parity Technologies, led by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, has released a Bitcoin technology stack ^[1] and has redeployed the Bitcoin protocol in Rust, providing a high-performance and reliable alternative to existing Bitcoin software.

Parity (aka Ethcore, which claims to be the world’s fastest and lightest client) has been developing the Polkadot protocol, a multi-chain framework that allows multiple blockchains to interoperate, including private deployments. The team has also released several key protocol upgrades, including the revolutionary “Warp sync” and a robust ETH software that is strong enough to withstand multiple attacks on the ETH blockchain last year.

This technology stack is fully compatible with the existing Bitcoin system and meets the highest standards of software development. The software has also obtained the free software license GNU GPL, and other projects can also use its code base.

Parity Technologies founder Wood believes that the code clarity, performance, and reliability brought by the Rust language make the Parity Bitcoin client the best choice for developers. He said:

We sincerely hope to contribute this product to the Bitcoin developer community and hopefully set a good precedent for technological innovation. We are willing to work with other Bitcoin protocols to find important improvements to features such as Schnorr signatures.

The development of this client was jointly funded by the well-known Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, Bixin (formerly HaoBTC) and Bitmain. Bitmain commented:

Parity is the icing on the cake for the many deployment options for Bitcoin. The diverse options in the Bitcoin ecosystem represent the needs of different participants, and everyone can adopt the solution that works for them.

Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox also commented on the release of the new client:

Zcash is based on Bitcoin, and we are also starting to use Rust, so we are really happy when we see such a great team deploying Bitcoin in Rust. This kind of innovation can promote the development of the entire ecosystem.

The Parity Bitcoin client is now available for download from Github.

Notes (↵ returns to text)

1. A technology stack generally refers to combining N technologies (N>1) as an organic whole to achieve a certain purpose. It can also refer to the experience of mastering these technologies and using them together.