RSK: Bringing the Bitcoin Blockchain Closer to Ethereum 2.0

Rage Review : Ethereum smart contracts have received great attention from the blockchain community and have also been recognized by the Bitcoin community. Some defects of Bitcoin itself have hindered its further development. Therefore, many individuals and companies that support Bitcoin hope to help it become more perfect. For this reason, the RSK Federation Alliance was established to jointly explore how to use Ethereum smart contracts to enhance the functions of Bitcoin and maintain its market competitiveness.

Translation: Annie_Xu

When Vitalik Buterin was 16 years old, he was very excited when he saw the Bitcoin white paper in 2013. He believed that the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin could do a lot more.

Satoshi Nakamoto designed the Bitcoin blockchain to support only monetary applications, so Buterin believes that it is impossible to change this.

"Bitcoin was designed with the SMTP protocol, which can only handle a single task. It can be used to transfer funds, but it cannot support the development of other protocols."

So he decided to develop a new blockchain that could support countless applications, and thus Ethereum was born. Now Ethereum has attracted much attention. Many startups have developed solutions based on it, including door locks, driverless cars, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Bitcoin enthusiasts believe that the Bitcoin blockchain can support innovation beyond currency, and many developers are challenging Ethereum's dominance in the field of decentralized applications.

Open Source Projects

25 companies in the Bitcoin space have formed the RSK Federation, which has become the leader of these challengers. Its members include Xapo, BitPay, Bitstamp, and Bitfinex. The RSK blog welcomes everyone to join its open source project.

“RSK is an open source project, so participation and contribution from the entire community is important.”

RSK Federation was officially established in August. Its main purpose is to use the smart contract solution developed by Argentinian startup Rootstock. The alliance will build a Turing-complete smart contract layer on top of Bitcoin to support more application development. Wences Casares, CEO of Xapo, said:

“We are excited about RSK’s work on adding Ethereum-like functionality to the Bitcoin network.”

Using the platform requires paying for Bitcoin "gas" - a colored coin. The way to get colored coins is to send Bitcoin to the RSK platform address. The blog post stated that part of the "gas" goes to Bitcoin miners, and the rest is used for the project itself.

“Every time a person or business runs a smart contract on RSK, 80% of the gas goes to the miners and 20% to RSK Labs. This allows us to continue the development work on the open source platform.”

RSK does not compete with Ethereum, but is compatible with applications on the Ethereum platform, ultimately achieving cross-chain communication between the two platforms.

The RSK platform’s two-way peg feature enables this goal, allowing Bitcoin to be sent to and from other blockchains, such as Ethereum.

Bitcoin’s bright future

In March 2016, the RSK project announced that it had received $1 million in investment from mining hardware manufacturers such as Bitmain Technology, as well as companies such as Coinsilium and Digital Currency Group (DCG) that are very interested in blockchain startups.

Barry Silbert

DCG CEO Barry Silbert believes that blockchain with smart contract capabilities can achieve global financial and political inclusion and promote the development of the Internet of Things.

“The DCG team believes that the development of Rootstock will advance the development of blockchain technology and business development enterprises, enabling new use cases that are not currently possible.”

Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar, CEO and founder of Rootstock, which is carrying out the project, believes that Bitcoin combined with smart contracts can make cryptocurrencies more powerful.

“Adding functionality to Bitcoin and addressing the core issues with current script processing will hopefully overcome many of its flaws in the coming years while maintaining its intrinsic value.”

If RSK Federation succeeds, the trend of Bitcoin development will be reversed while protecting Bitcoin's competitiveness in the cryptocurrency field.

On November 5, the project team announced the release of the test network Turmeric.