While Ethereum was gaining more and more attention from the world, Rootstock was born in December 2015. Developers have attempted to solve Bitcoin’s scalability problem with “sidechains,” opening up new possibilities for experimentation. Rootstock is a distributed platform for smart contracts built on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Its goal is to implement complex smart contracts as a sidechain, by building a fully functional "Turing" on a sidechain of Bitcoin. Complete" smart contract platform to add value and functionality to the core Bitcoin network, which means that Rootstock is not only used for value exchange between two parties, but can be
used for more complex transactions. Unlike Ethereum, Rootstock uses a different open-source blockchain protocol to build smart contracts, it implements an improvement on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and the development team uses tokens that can be converted to Bitcoin as "fuel" for smart contracts And removed the need for
the . Notably, although Rootstock is built on the Bitcoin sidechain, it uses the Turing Virtual Machine combined with the Ethereum opcode. In this way, Rootstock is fully compatible with the Ethereum platform and works perfectly on both the Rootstock blockchain (aka Bitcoin sidechain) and the
Ethereum . The combination and compatibility of the two major blockchain platforms, Ethereum and Bitcoin, makes the advantages of Rootstock even more obvious. According to news on March 22, 2016, blockchain startup RSK Labs has announced that it has received $1 million in seed funding to support the development of Rootstock.
When it comes to smart contracts, we have to mention the concept of Lightning Network. What is Lightning Network? Its main purpose is to achieve secure off-chain transactions, and its essence is a mechanism that uses hash time-locked smart contracts to securely conduct 0
- Securely conduct unconfirmed transactions on In February 2015, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja released a draft of what they called the "Lightning Network." At the time it was only an incomplete proposal and had no code, but it
caused considerable excitement in the Bitcoin technical community as the draft opened up the possibility of instant arbitrary party payments in Bitcoin. It can be said that the Lightning Network is a cache of Bitcoin, and its basic design is based on a network payment channel. Lightning Network transactions are unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions. The Lightning Network
does hold anyone's funds, all funds are stored in multi-signature funding transactions in the Bitcoin network, and what the Lightning Network does is to make signing transactions between participants more convenient. To put it simply, for example, in a Bitcoin transaction, both parties establish a transaction chain, and only the last transaction in the transaction chain
needs to enter the real Bitcoin blockchain. This is a simple payment channel idea. It turns out that with just a handful of Bitcoin upgrades that are almost non-controversial, one can generate more general payment channels that allow for two-way payments, but also "conditional payments," which allow for the construction of a payment network
. In fact, smart contracts such as "if A pays B, I pay C" can be set up in a safe and trustless way. After the contract condition occurs, your wallet will automatically broadcast the payment transaction condition to the Bitcoin network, and then just wait. The idea of a payment channel like the Lightning Network is a viable way
to solve Bitcoin's scalability, micropayments, and 0-confirmation problems, helping participants conduct transactions directly, rather than sending transactions through the blockchain and encrypting them with it. To ensure information security, only use the blockchain as the final settlement mechanism. Based on this, the Lightning Network can be said to be off-chain
The killer concept application of centralized transactions, of course, the Lightning Network does not exist yet, but if we can implement this concept in the application and execute billions of small transactions for free and in real time, then the Lightning Network can indeed solve our current problems. many problems.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are ready enough to help smart contracts become a reality, and may ultimately be a win-win for crypto and smart contracts. Smart contracts can explain the unique benefits of virtual currency to people, which will attract more users to virtual currency. Smart property may be a
long way off, but digital cash and synthetic assets have emerged today, and more smart contract mechanisms are being devised. So far, design principles are important for automating contract execution from disparate fields like economics and cryptography, but there is a lack of cross-communication between the two, a lack of awareness of the
technology on the one hand, and the best business practices on the other. Lack of awareness of use. The idea of smart contracts is to recognize efforts towards a common goal, which will converge on the concept of smart contracts.