Rootstock (RSK) – Bitcoin powered Smart Contracts
“…Rootstock (RSK), a smart-contract platform that incorporates a Turing Complete Virtual Machine to Bitcoin. It also provides other enhancement to the network such as faster transactions and better scalability, features that we also believe will enable new usage scenarios.
RSK is an evolution of QixCoin, a turing-complete cryptocurrency created back in 2013 by the same development team. RSK provides an improved payment experience with near instant confirmations. It achieves currently 300 tps and confirms most payments in less than 20 seconds. And yet, is still based on the same security guarantees Bitcoin has, supporting SHA-256D merged mining.
RSK works as a Bitcoin Sidechain. When Bitcoins are transferred into the Rootstock blockchain, they become “Rootcoins” (RTC). Rootcoins are equivalent to bitcoins living in the Rootstock blockchain, and they can be transferred back to Bitcoins at any time at no additional cost (except for standard Rootstock transaction fees). RTC is the base currency used on the RSK sidechain to pay miners for transaction and contract processing. There is no currency issuance: all RTC are created from Bitcoins coming from the Bitcoin blockchain.
Rootstock enhances Bitcoin in the following areas:
- Turing-complete Rootstock Virtual Machine (RVM) allowing smart-contracts
- Average first confirmation of transactions in 10 seconds
- Safe merged mining combining PoW with threshold-signature based federation
- Embedded low-delay fast relay backbone into peer-to-peer gossip network.
- Two-way pegging using sidechains (currently a federated peg, fully automatic peg subject to Bitcoin improvements)…”
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