Although smart contract projects on alternative blockchains such as Ethereum are gaining a lot of attention, smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain itself are challenging because the Bitcoin network is not a “Turing Complete” system.
A Turing Complete system is one that can compute any algorithmically computable function (although with no guarantees regarding runtime or memory). The Bitcoin network has purposefully omitted Turing completeness to allow the economic incentives the network has been able to create, and for minimizing the security risks that come with self-executable programs.
But a new smart contracts project by RSK Labs called Rootstock aims to bring smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain while being a Turing Complete platform. In a blog post on Medium the company said that Rootstock will be similar to the Ethereum project but will use the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“Essentially Rootstock aims to be what Ethereum is, a decentralized, Turing-complete smart contract platform. However, Rootstock aims to utilize the Bitcoin ecosystem rather than creating a new one from scratch. The way this will be accomplished is via the still not fully implemented sidechains technology,” the blog post reads.
According to the company, Rootstock (RSK) will be a sidechain that allows interoperability between both blockchains. Developers of RSK believe that the interoperability will keep investments safer and prevent them from “withering” away like altcoins.
Being a sidechain, the company said that Rootstock would not have a typical alternative token for pre-sale but provide a two-way peg between Rootstock’s native currency RTC and Bitcoin. In order to use the RSK system users would have to transfer bitcoins from their accounts to the Rootstock sidechain. Which would then be converted to RTC, but can also be reverted to BTC at any time.
“As a result of being a sidechain Rootstock will not issue a new currency or token. Instead in […]
