One of the most anticipated Bitcoin projects is to schedule a live network launch later in the year.
Revealed in an interview with CoinDesk, the startup of RSK aims to quickly establish a technology that will bring a smart contract feature to bitcoin in the form of an interoperable sidechain. According to RSK's co-founder and chief scientist, Sergio Lerner, with the official launch, users will be able to use for the first time tools similar to Ethereum on Bitcoin.
As CoinDesk points out, side chains allow token exchanges between bitcoin and other blockchains with different technical properties.
Lerner told CoinDesk:
"This will be RSK mainnet launch, you will be able to transfer …" smart bitcoins ", RSK native cryptocurrency, you will be able to deploy any contract in Solidity and deploy using bitcoin cryptocurrency. "
There is however a problem with this launch timing: RSK has to wait until Segwit2x's hard fork arrives in the middle of the month, which could (if implemented) split bitcoin into two chips in competition.
"We wait for the hard fork to pass for the launch We do not know what [cryptocurrency] will last. […] The change is conditional on the fork, it's a must," he added .
The startup says that it has additional long-term plans, such as the addition of new "opcodes" – or rules for blockchains that developers can use in their smart contracts – that's why it's a good idea. he searched for the sidechain.
Lerner also noted the planned addition of "confidential transactions", which would protect certain types of transaction data, and chain-wide scaling improvements that could increase the number of transactions that RSK users can perform per second. These two goals, he said, could come to fruition in 2018.
"We have a lot to add to the future," he said.
The development comes at a time when other efforts to bring smart contracts to bitcoin also see progress.
For example, Blockstream infrastructure developer Russell O Connor unveiled last week a white paper showing a possible new avenue for the Bitcoin scripting language called Simplicity, a proposal that is currently under discussion.
Disclaimer: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which participated in the organization of the Segwit2x agreement and holds stakes in RSK Labs and Blockstream
Image of the miniature train via RSK
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