Rootstock Head Believes Expansion of RSK Federation Means Bitcoin Companies Are Ready for Sidechains

05.08.2016

Buenos Aires-based startup RSK has announced several cryptocurrency companies has joined its initiative known as RSK Federation.

The federation’s expansion emits a signal to Bitcoin ecosystem and confirms that lots of companies are ready to financially guarantee the usage of sidechains, thinks Rootstock CEO and co-founder Diego GutiĂ©rrez Zaldivar.

â€śThe whole extension of bitcoin, and solving some of its biggest challenges with richer scripting, will solve a lot of shortcomings of bitcoin in the coming years while protecting the intrinsic value of bitcoin,â€ť Zaldivar stated.

RSK Federation was created to support Rootstock, a smart contracts platform acting as a Turing-complete VM backwards-compatible with Ethereum. It was launched in test mode this May. The platform generates blocks every 20 seconds and allows for 200 transactions per second, with further acceleration to 1,000 transactions per second. The platform also uses its own blockchain to maintain ‘the required level of security’.

In technical terms, Rootstock is a sidechain, i.e. a blockchain existing separately from the main blockchain. The assets may freely move in both directions following a pre-arranged set of rules. This allows for additional operations without sacrificing the security found in Bitcoin’s blockchain. Rootstock token RTC is pegged to bitcoin. Transacting in the system would require transferring some amount in BTC to the sidechain, where it will be blocked with the equivalent amount of RCT unblocked. The reverse transfer is similar, i.e. in that case, RTC gets blocked, while BTC becomes available.

In practical terms, such transactions require warrants of money transfers between the chains, as Bitcoin ‘does not know’ about transactions in other blockchains. RSK Federation was created for that purpose; its members get rewarded for transacting.

The list of supporting companies includes Bitcointoyou, Bitex, Bitfinex, bitFlyer, Bitgo, Bitoasis, Bitpay, Bitso, Bits of Gold, Bitstamp, Blockchain, Blockchain Intelligence Group, Blocktrail, BTCC, BitKan, SurBTC, CoinBR, Huobi, OKCoin, Paycase, Tether, and Unocoin. The startup states that new members join RSK Federation every week.

This May, RSK has announced it attracted an additional $1m of investment to fund the development of smart contracts platform Rootstock. The round was closed by Bitmain Technology, Coinsilium, and Digital Currency Group.

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