the XCP dev's spot to a reporter and it was leaked out that they plan to push out Ethereum on BTC mainnet later this year.
So whether it is rootstock or XCP, there will be a few choices for using Ethereum smart contracts with BTC.
Btw when the premature news came out XCP went 3X within 15 minutes, then back down as the developers came out saying that the reporter shouldn't have put out the news as they still need to do more testing before they release it for BTC mainnet.
Agree I think both Rootstock and XCP have their own key advantages and disadvantages. At the moment XCP is further along than rootstock as the sidechain concept hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, much less production ready. A few major problem with Rootstock is that miners can effectively attack the chain for free, that 2 way decentralized pegs don't exist in any form of manturity at this time, and perhaps the biggest that r
ootstock corporation takes 20% of every contract execution cost and pockets it, despite calling it a 1:1 bitcoin peg. (as opposed to debiting the gas costs in xcp and removing it from supply, which benefits each and every holder of XCP rather than a centralized entity.)
"As a result, every time a person or a corporation runs a smart contract on RSK, 80% of the fuel paid goes to the miners and the remaining 20% to RSK Labs, so we can continue the development of the open source platform."
I think XCP has long declined in value as the news of smart contracts have gone full circle from being priced in and hyped up then priced back out as expectations have been invalidated with a slow release. Things have gone downhill then chugged along sideways for a long tine. The brief rise in price was only punctured by tempered moods as it was revealed the news was leaked a prematurely. Otherwise it would of stayed up there.
See the following quote by Vitalik
"
My personal opinion is that XCP-style meta-consensus systems are the next generation from here, at least as far as Bitcoin-based protocols are concerned". --
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum lead dev "So, Counterparty sucks because it is too powerful?
I was involved in the colored coins project for a few months before I moved to my position that
XCP-style systems are strictly superior to CC in basically every possible way (and moved to Ethereum full-time, but I will say that Ethereum is not superior to CC in every possible way because it is not directly based on Bitcoin so doesn't have as nice interoperability properties" --
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum lead devOur compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts is at the virtual machine level, so it doesn't matter what language (Serpent, Solidity, LLL, etc.), you write the contracts in---they'll run on both Counterparty and Ethereum the same. Between the Counterparty and the Ethereum communities, we'll figure out what languages we want to write contracts in and develop those. --
Adam Krellenstein, Counterparty lead dev I expect as the code actually hits mainnet and we begin to see ported smart contracts on the bitcoin blockchain, when XCP starts becoming debited for as along with token issuance we'll start to benefit from the emerging DaPP ecosystem. With a tiny market cap and scarce total supply I think it's a good recipe for some positive price action and there was already a small taste of things to come. CounterParty was the original project to implement ethereum VM and perhaps the most well known and it's not going anywhere.