What is Rootstock? Rootstock is also abbreviated as RSK, RSK is a Bitcoin Sidechain. Provides an improved payment experience with near-instant confirmation. It achieves speeds of 300 Tps and confirms most payments in less than twenty seconds.
So what is Rootstock? What’s special about it? Let’s find out in this article!
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What is Rootstock?
Overview of Rootstock
Rootstock is also abbreviated as RSK, RSK is a Bitcoin Sidechain. Provides an improved payment experience with near-instant confirmation. It achieves speeds of 300 Tps and confirms most payments in less than twenty seconds.
When Bitcoins are transferred into the RSK blockchain, they become “SmartBitcoins” (SBTC). SmartBitcoin equivalents to Bitcoin exist in the RSK blockchain, and they can be converted back to Bitcoin at any time without additional fees. SBTC is the base currency used on Sidechain RSK to pay miners for processing transactions and contracts.
RSK strengthens Bitcoin in the following areas:
- RSK Virtual Machine (RVM) is a virtual machine that enables smart contract execution and is EVM compatible.
- First transaction confirmation takes an average of ten seconds.
- Secure merged mining combines PoW with federated mining based on redundant threshold signatures.
- The low-latency fast forwarding backbone is embedded into the peer-to-peer network.
- Bi-directional binding using Sidechains (currently linked peg, fully automatic peg depending on Bitcoin improvements).
Mechanism of action
At its core, the RSK platform is a combination of:
- The virtual machine defines Turing-complete resource computation (for smart contracts).
- The Bitcoin sidechain is two-way pegged (for transactions in BTC).
- Dynamic coalescing/mining consensus protocol (for consensus security) and low latency network (for fast payments).
Turing-Complete Virtual Machine
The RSK Virtual Machine (RVM) is the core of the Smart Contract platform. Smart contracts are executed in parallel by a large proportion of network nodes. The result of smart contract execution can be the processing of inter-contract messages, the generation of monetary transactions, and changes to the state of the contract’s persistent memory.
Provide RVM opcode compatible with EVM, to enable Ethereum contracts to run flawlessly on RSK. In the initial release, the VM is implemented by interpretation. For the next release, it is planned to emulate EVM by automatically retargeting EVM opcodes to a subset of Java-like bytecode and a security-enhanced Java-like virtual machine and The memory constraint becomes the new virtual machine (RVM2). This will bring RSK code execution performance close to the native code.
Key points of RVM:
- The VM is independent and compatible with the EVM at the opcode level.
- RSK offers Ethereum users the ability to run their projects with the security of the Bitcoin network.
- New opcodes for int32 arithmetic are faster and compile on time better (planned), for better performance.
Sidechain
Sidechain is an independent blockchain whose native currency SmartBitcoin (SBTC) is automatically pegged to the BTC value of the Bitcoin chain using proof of payment. There is a two-way peg where two currencies can be exchanged freely, automatically and without price negotiation.
In reality no currency is transferred between blockchains in a single transaction because Bitcoin cannot verify the authenticity of balances on another blockchain. When a transfer occurs, some BTC is locked in Bitcoin and the same amount of SBTC is unlocked in RSK. When SBTC needs to be converted back to BTC, the SBTC will be locked again in RSK and the same amount of BTC will be unlocked in Bitcoin.
It is possible to create a completely trusted and third-party-free two-way peg using smart contracts on both platforms. But since Bitcoin currently supports neither smart contracts nor native opcodes to validate external SPV proofs, part of the two-way peg system in RSK requires trust in a set of semi-trusted third parties (STTP).
No single STTP can control the locked BTC, but only the majority of them are capable of releasing BTC coins. STTPs temporarily store locked BTC and to pay users Bitcoin SBTC locked in RSK.
Once Bitcoin adds special opcodes or scalability to validate SPV proofs in the form of a hard-fork, and once the new system is proven to be secure and trustless, then the Federation role as STTP will no longer be needed and the RSK team will implement changes to adapt RSK to untrusted systems.
Dynamic Hybrid Merged Mining/Federation
High-speed PoW consensus based on periodic blocks with low waste requires hardware miners and restarts them to mine on new mid-header states every time the network resolves a block new. On average, this results in a larger mining time gap or network latency for transitions between states.
These vulnerabilities reduce the efficiency of Bitcoin mining even if they only cost a few milliseconds. Therefore, RSK uses a DECOR+ block reward sharing scheme to reduce competition and allow late miners to switch to the best RSK block. If miners switched their hardware every time an RSK block was found, they would compete for the full RSK block reward. If they switch late and continue mining previous blocks, they will earn a portion of the block reward.
The RSK platform will be launched with the association of famous and respected members of the community. Each member is identified by a public key for the checkpoint signature scheme. The Federation can add or remove members using and embedded voting system, although these actions will require a high percentage of member votes.
The intention of the founders of RSK is that the RSK network will encourage merged mining. However, RSK is robust against merged mining shortages because the link is automatically included to protect the network in case of shortages.
Development Roadmap
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Core Team
Rube Altman: Co Founder
- Rube earned a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires.
- Rube used to work as Director of Software Development at MIVA Ltd.
- In mid-2017, Rube started his business with the Kinetica Solutions project and broke up after 9 years of working together.
- Present. Rube is Co Founder of Rootstock and recently founded a new company, Antom.la.
Adrian Eidelman
- Adrián earned a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Buenos Aires and a degree in Marketing from the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology.
- Adrián worked as a Software Engineer at many companies such as Quick Software Solutions, daVinci, Baufest, Estudio Nudelman, CDS.
- Together with Rube, they started a business with the Kinetica Solutions project and broke up after nearly 11 years together.
- Currently, Adrián serves as CTO and Co Founder of Rootstock.
Investors
After 9 rounds of capital raising, the total amount of money that Rootstock successfully raised was $7.3M (there were rounds of capital raising without information) with the participation of Bitmain, Digital Currency Group, Coinsilium Group,…
Tokenomics
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Exchanges
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Rootstock’s Information Channel
- Website: https://rootstock.io/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/rootstock_io
- Discord:
Summary
Rootstock also helps address Bitcoin’s scalability and further increases its applicability. But it also causes overload and congestion of the Bitcoin network. It is also unknown whether the Bitcoin community will accept Bitcoin-based solutions in the future. So the future of Rootstock and other solutions is also unclear.
So let me clarify what Rootstock is? Rootstock cryptocurrency overview. Hope this article provides you with a lot of useful knowledge!
