What is Rootstock?

A lot of developers and Bitcoin enthusiasts are looking forward to issuing smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Up until now, this has been possible, albeit very few people experimented with it. The imminent launch of Rootstock may change all of that. Considering this project will launch a week from now, it is a good time to recap what Rootstock will bring to the table.

Rootstock is a Major Improvement For Bitcoin

People who have been keeping an eye on the cryptocurrency world will have heard of Rootstock before. This platform can introduce many great features for Bitcoin in the coming years. First of all, Rootstock will introduce smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain, which is quite a significant development. Contrary to what people believe, such a feature has been made possible several years ago, even though most people paid little attention to that development.

To be more specific, Rootstock positions itself as an open-source smart contract platform that has a two-way peg to Bitcoin. The team behind this project firmly believes in Bitcoin and the future success of this popular digital asset. Up until now, there was a lack of Turing-complete smart contract capabilities, but Rootstock will alleviate these concerns.

Additionally, Rootstock will also reward Bitcoin miners through a process known as merge-mining. The developers launched the merge-mining ecosystem back in November of 2016 and allow users to mine both Bitcoin and Ethereum as part of the same ecosystem. That is a radical change to the way mining is taking place right now and will bring some new challenges to the ecosystem for sure.

Another benefit provided by Rootstock comes in the form of scalability, a topic of substantial debate in the world of Bitcoin right now. Rootstock aims to scale to 100 transactions per second, which would put the platform on the same level as PayPal. However, the team aims to do so without sacrificing decentralization. Additionally, they want to focus on blockchain sharding, fraud proofs, and reducing storage and bandwidth usage.

Perhaps the biggest feature to look forward to is how Rootstock will introduce instant payments. This technology will be compatible with the Bitcoin network and open up a slew of new possibilities. The Rootstock ecosystem uses carefully chosen parameters and creates blocks at an average time interval of 10 seconds, rather than 10 minutes. This is quite an intriguing development many people will want to experiment with once Rootstock launches.

Speaking of the launch, Rootstock will go live in about a week from now. Do keep in mind they will launch a new test-net, rather than a main-net implementation. It is expected the main implementation will occur in about a month after the new test-net launch, although that date may be moved up a bit if needed. If the protocol works as advertised, we may see a less burdened Bitcoin blockchain without sacrificing decentralization. An interesting development, to say the least.

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