Quote
Recently, the private testnet of Bitcoin based smart contract platform Rootstock went live. In advance of this milestone, RSK Labs co-founder Sergio Demian Lerner, popped into the ConsenSys offices in Bushwick. We took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the amazing technology he and his team are developing.
With regard to finance and the internet, what is the worldview that Rootstock is operating within?
We are convinced that smart contract platforms on top of public blockchains will play key role in the next wave of disruptive innovation.
Technologies such as Bitcoin and Rootstock will facilitate the evolution of the internet of things and democratize the access to financial services and decentralized services.
Today the fastest growing 50% of human population is unbanked or underserved by the traditional financial system and this is one of the most important causes of the growing income inequalities of the world.
We are confident that the growing access to smartphones and internet by the most vulnerable part of our global society along with the development of smart contracts over permissionless blockchains, will contribute to a more democratic access to financial services and economic development across the globe.
What is the market opportunity that is being served by Rootstock?
Rootstock has been conceived in order to align the incentives of the most relevant stakeholders in the virtual-currencies ecosystem.
Rootstock provides Bitcoin miners (the most important, tested and secure mining network worldwide) the opportunity to participate in the smart contract revolution receiving a new revenue stream with their current hardware and electricity consumption.
Rootstock also benefits the Bitcoin ecosystem by using bitcoins as fuel to run Rootstock smart contracts.
Finally, Rootstock provides Ethereum projects and developers a fully compatible alternative to run their solutions, benefitting from the security of the Bitcoin network.
In terms of real use cases and services to be offered over Rootstock, there are currently several partner companies that are working in our testnet on micro-lending solutions, asset tokenization, decentralized voting and several other financial applications that provide new innovative solutions in different markets all across the world.
Can you explain what exactly Rootstock is?
Rootstock is an open-source smart-contract platform compatible with the Ethereum DApp interface that uses Bitcoin as the native cryptocurrency. The smart contract capability of rootstock enables numerous applications, such as micropayment channels, escrow services, crowdfunding, crypto-asset creation, decentralized remittances, IP protection, asset registry, voting systems, micro-lending, supply chain traceability, online reputation, digital identity, in-game currency, prediction markets and fair-playing.
To create a smart contract platform, Rootstock implements a Turing complete deterministic replicated virtual machine compatible with the EVM. Rootstock also provides an improved payment experience with near instant confirmation: It achieves currently 300 tps and confirms most payments in less than 20 seconds. The security of Rootstock is provided by the Bitcoin miners using the merged-mining technique. To be able to interact with Bitcoin, Rootstock implements a Bitcoin 2-Way peg (2WP). The 2WP allows bitcoins to be transferred to and from Rootstock at a fixed conversion rate. Rootstock 2WP design is a hybrid drivechain+federation/sidechain. The sidechain functionality is provided by a state-full SPV node (including multisig-wallet) running in a smart-contract. Rootstock is also backwards-compatible with Ethereum, so Ethereum distributed applications (DApps) can be easily ported to Rootstock and achieve Bitcoin-level security, faster execution and greater interoperability with Bitcoin. Rootstock is being actively developed by RSK Labs Ltd., which was founded in 2015 and which has received private funding from key players in the FinTech industry and Bitcoin ecosystem. The platform will be launched in Q3 2016. More information, including founder’s team, and white papers can be downloaded here.
What are its component parts?
The main components of the Rootstock platform are the Core (full node), the two way peg subsystem, the FedNode and the merge-mining subsystem. Similar to Ethereum, the Core provides network connectivity, blockchain consensus and virtual machine for contract execution. The two way peg subsystem comprises the Bridge smart-contract, which provides Bitcoin blockchain services for Rootstock contracts and manages the two-way peg. The FedNode is a second type of full node that connects to both the Bitcoin blockchain and the Rootstock blockchain, moves transaction and block information back and forth and communicates with the Bridge contract to orchestrate signing of Bitcoin transactions to unlock bitcoins when transferred back to the Bitcoin blockchain. Finally, the merge-mining subsystem comprises the SHA256-based PoW mining function in the core, and several plug-ins for the different Mining pool management applications to allow merge-mining with Bitcoin.
How does it compare with Ethereum?
Rootstock shares the account/contract core design with Ethereum, and this is unavoidable due to the compatibility requirement we’ve imposed ourselves. The Rootstock full node is based on the EthereumJ codebase, the BitcoinJ codebase, and our own code. Ethereum developers will find very few differences when porting Ethereum applications to Rootstock. However, internally we’ve advanced in several areas of technology and science that leads to higher scalability, higher performance, lower latency, higher security and more flexibility. The first release aims for 100% Ethereum compatibility, while our following release aims for increased privacy, scalability and reduced resource consumption on nodes.
How is Rootstock similar? How is it different?
Our technology has historically evolved independently from Ethereum so we’ve been able to advance in several areas. Regarding scalability, we’re first implementing a more straightforward strategy than Ethereum’s long term sharding plan. We’re not forcing the user to move contracts into a specific isolated shard, our platform allows smart contracts to specify and dynamically update address dependencies, so our full node is able to parallelize transaction validation by partitioning the transaction set. This is an improvement in terms of CPU resource consumption, and allows scalability close to the number of processing cores that each Rootstock node has. Regarding latency, Rootstock uses DECOR+GHOST protocols to reduce the block interval to 10 seconds on average, which is lower than the current 16 second average of Ethereum. DÉCOR+ also increases the security of the blockchain compared to Ethereum/Bitcoin preventing known uncle mining or selfish mining strategies. Lastly, the low-level network protocol has several optimizations to minimize latency and reduce stale block generation.
Rootstock planned improvements include higher security: on the cryptographic side it will allow users to define their own signature schemes. This promotes algorithm agility and allows the platform to easily migrate from signature schemes that may become insecure over time. On the consensus side, we’re leveraging on the Bitcoin miners to provide security to the blockchain using the merge-mining technique and proof-of-work, and we’re confident that we’ll have very high miner engagement soon after launch. Ethereum is moving away to proof-of-stake, which is interesting, but the security of Casper is yet to be tested both in theory and in the real world.
Regarding flexibility, we’re working on a new toolchain that allows smart contracts to be written in a mainstream language, using existing and well-tested developments environments. This relates to a new VM that retargets EVM opcodes into a new native Rootstock Virtual Machine based on bytecodes that are more easily optimized.
Regarding performance, our new revamped VM will support JIT compiling, so smart-contract execution will become much cheaper than in Ethereum.
Also there are several differences in the protocol governance model, and in the funding model: we’ve not created a new speculative token and we use Bitcoins, so the Rootstock revenue model is simply pay per use, not an ICO.
Why these differences? How do they derive from your world view and identified market opportunity?
Rootstock tries to combine a public blockchain (providing censorship-resistance, openness, zero-inflation guarantee), with a blockchain that satisfies the needs of institutional use-cases (banking regulations, clearer settlement finality, scalability, privacy). For example, the multi-signature based federation (similar to a consortium) provides checkpoints, and nodes are configured by default to temporarily halt operation in case of disagreement.
We think that Bitcoin has the stronger network effect, and a strong Bitcoin is best for the whole ecosystem, including other public “competing” cryptocurrencies. This led to the two-way peg, and the merge-mining design choices.
What is the roadmap for this year?
The full node, merge-mining and two-way peg are already working. We’re currently improving our core components. If you want to test your applications before the platform launch, there is an invite-only testnet. Companies can contact us to apply for participation at this stage. The first public testnet will be in September, and at that time the source code will be open-sourced. The plan is to launch the platform in December.
Where can people go to learn more?
For developers, the best place to start is visiting one of the many existent Ethereum sites. You can learn about the Rootstock platform specific design, two-way peg, governance model, security and scalability on the white papers published at www.rootstock.io.
With regard to finance and the internet, what is the worldview that Rootstock is operating within?
We are convinced that smart contract platforms on top of public blockchains will play key role in the next wave of disruptive innovation.
Technologies such as Bitcoin and Rootstock will facilitate the evolution of the internet of things and democratize the access to financial services and decentralized services.
Today the fastest growing 50% of human population is unbanked or underserved by the traditional financial system and this is one of the most important causes of the growing income inequalities of the world.
We are confident that the growing access to smartphones and internet by the most vulnerable part of our global society along with the development of smart contracts over permissionless blockchains, will contribute to a more democratic access to financial services and economic development across the globe.
What is the market opportunity that is being served by Rootstock?
Rootstock has been conceived in order to align the incentives of the most relevant stakeholders in the virtual-currencies ecosystem.
Rootstock provides Bitcoin miners (the most important, tested and secure mining network worldwide) the opportunity to participate in the smart contract revolution receiving a new revenue stream with their current hardware and electricity consumption.
Rootstock also benefits the Bitcoin ecosystem by using bitcoins as fuel to run Rootstock smart contracts.
Finally, Rootstock provides Ethereum projects and developers a fully compatible alternative to run their solutions, benefitting from the security of the Bitcoin network.
In terms of real use cases and services to be offered over Rootstock, there are currently several partner companies that are working in our testnet on micro-lending solutions, asset tokenization, decentralized voting and several other financial applications that provide new innovative solutions in different markets all across the world.
Can you explain what exactly Rootstock is?
Rootstock is an open-source smart-contract platform compatible with the Ethereum DApp interface that uses Bitcoin as the native cryptocurrency. The smart contract capability of rootstock enables numerous applications, such as micropayment channels, escrow services, crowdfunding, crypto-asset creation, decentralized remittances, IP protection, asset registry, voting systems, micro-lending, supply chain traceability, online reputation, digital identity, in-game currency, prediction markets and fair-playing.
To create a smart contract platform, Rootstock implements a Turing complete deterministic replicated virtual machine compatible with the EVM. Rootstock also provides an improved payment experience with near instant confirmation: It achieves currently 300 tps and confirms most payments in less than 20 seconds. The security of Rootstock is provided by the Bitcoin miners using the merged-mining technique. To be able to interact with Bitcoin, Rootstock implements a Bitcoin 2-Way peg (2WP). The 2WP allows bitcoins to be transferred to and from Rootstock at a fixed conversion rate. Rootstock 2WP design is a hybrid drivechain+federation/sidechain. The sidechain functionality is provided by a state-full SPV node (including multisig-wallet) running in a smart-contract. Rootstock is also backwards-compatible with Ethereum, so Ethereum distributed applications (DApps) can be easily ported to Rootstock and achieve Bitcoin-level security, faster execution and greater interoperability with Bitcoin. Rootstock is being actively developed by RSK Labs Ltd., which was founded in 2015 and which has received private funding from key players in the FinTech industry and Bitcoin ecosystem. The platform will be launched in Q3 2016. More information, including founder’s team, and white papers can be downloaded here.
What are its component parts?
The main components of the Rootstock platform are the Core (full node), the two way peg subsystem, the FedNode and the merge-mining subsystem. Similar to Ethereum, the Core provides network connectivity, blockchain consensus and virtual machine for contract execution. The two way peg subsystem comprises the Bridge smart-contract, which provides Bitcoin blockchain services for Rootstock contracts and manages the two-way peg. The FedNode is a second type of full node that connects to both the Bitcoin blockchain and the Rootstock blockchain, moves transaction and block information back and forth and communicates with the Bridge contract to orchestrate signing of Bitcoin transactions to unlock bitcoins when transferred back to the Bitcoin blockchain. Finally, the merge-mining subsystem comprises the SHA256-based PoW mining function in the core, and several plug-ins for the different Mining pool management applications to allow merge-mining with Bitcoin.
How does it compare with Ethereum?
Rootstock shares the account/contract core design with Ethereum, and this is unavoidable due to the compatibility requirement we’ve imposed ourselves. The Rootstock full node is based on the EthereumJ codebase, the BitcoinJ codebase, and our own code. Ethereum developers will find very few differences when porting Ethereum applications to Rootstock. However, internally we’ve advanced in several areas of technology and science that leads to higher scalability, higher performance, lower latency, higher security and more flexibility. The first release aims for 100% Ethereum compatibility, while our following release aims for increased privacy, scalability and reduced resource consumption on nodes.
How is Rootstock similar? How is it different?
Our technology has historically evolved independently from Ethereum so we’ve been able to advance in several areas. Regarding scalability, we’re first implementing a more straightforward strategy than Ethereum’s long term sharding plan. We’re not forcing the user to move contracts into a specific isolated shard, our platform allows smart contracts to specify and dynamically update address dependencies, so our full node is able to parallelize transaction validation by partitioning the transaction set. This is an improvement in terms of CPU resource consumption, and allows scalability close to the number of processing cores that each Rootstock node has. Regarding latency, Rootstock uses DECOR+GHOST protocols to reduce the block interval to 10 seconds on average, which is lower than the current 16 second average of Ethereum. DÉCOR+ also increases the security of the blockchain compared to Ethereum/Bitcoin preventing known uncle mining or selfish mining strategies. Lastly, the low-level network protocol has several optimizations to minimize latency and reduce stale block generation.
Rootstock planned improvements include higher security: on the cryptographic side it will allow users to define their own signature schemes. This promotes algorithm agility and allows the platform to easily migrate from signature schemes that may become insecure over time. On the consensus side, we’re leveraging on the Bitcoin miners to provide security to the blockchain using the merge-mining technique and proof-of-work, and we’re confident that we’ll have very high miner engagement soon after launch. Ethereum is moving away to proof-of-stake, which is interesting, but the security of Casper is yet to be tested both in theory and in the real world.
Regarding flexibility, we’re working on a new toolchain that allows smart contracts to be written in a mainstream language, using existing and well-tested developments environments. This relates to a new VM that retargets EVM opcodes into a new native Rootstock Virtual Machine based on bytecodes that are more easily optimized.
Regarding performance, our new revamped VM will support JIT compiling, so smart-contract execution will become much cheaper than in Ethereum.
Also there are several differences in the protocol governance model, and in the funding model: we’ve not created a new speculative token and we use Bitcoins, so the Rootstock revenue model is simply pay per use, not an ICO.
Why these differences? How do they derive from your world view and identified market opportunity?
Rootstock tries to combine a public blockchain (providing censorship-resistance, openness, zero-inflation guarantee), with a blockchain that satisfies the needs of institutional use-cases (banking regulations, clearer settlement finality, scalability, privacy). For example, the multi-signature based federation (similar to a consortium) provides checkpoints, and nodes are configured by default to temporarily halt operation in case of disagreement.
We think that Bitcoin has the stronger network effect, and a strong Bitcoin is best for the whole ecosystem, including other public “competing” cryptocurrencies. This led to the two-way peg, and the merge-mining design choices.
What is the roadmap for this year?
The full node, merge-mining and two-way peg are already working. We’re currently improving our core components. If you want to test your applications before the platform launch, there is an invite-only testnet. Companies can contact us to apply for participation at this stage. The first public testnet will be in September, and at that time the source code will be open-sourced. The plan is to launch the platform in December.
Where can people go to learn more?
For developers, the best place to start is visiting one of the many existent Ethereum sites. You can learn about the Rootstock platform specific design, two-way peg, governance model, security and scalability on the white papers published at www.rootstock.io.
https://media.consensys.net/2016/05/19/smart-contracts-are-coming-to-bitcoin/