Rootstock’s Merge-Mining to Strengthen Bitcoin Network, Miners

Several of the most influential Bitcoin companies have expressed their support to promote Smart Contracts over the Bitcoin network by participating in the RSK Federation. They include Bitcointoyou, Bitex, Bitfinex, bitFlyer, Bitgo, Bitoasis, Bitpay, Bitso, Bits of Gold, Bitstamp, Blockchain, Blockchain Intelligence Group, Blocktrail, BTCC, BitKan, JAXX, SurBTC, CoinBR, Huobi, OKCoin, Paycase, Tether, Unocoin, and Xapo.
The RSK federation will provide additional services such as generating external security checkpoints and active ‘oracling’ services to gather information from external sources. Federation members will also provide other services to RSK users such as instant peg liquidity and multisig services. All are in a bid to avoid another Dao-like episode.
RSK’s initial Testnet (Lotus) which launched in May 2016 is currently being tested by selected partners. The company says it expects to release its new version of the Testnet (Turmeric) by the end of September 2016 and launch its production network (Ginger) during Q1 2017.
CoinTelegraph spoke to Gabriel Kurman, RSK’s co-founder, about how Rootstock will better bring Ethereum-like capabilities to the Bitcoin network, strengthen the network and benefit Bitcoin miners.
‘BTC miners did not have any possibility of participating in the smart contract ecosystem until now,’ he says via Skype. ‘RSK allows them to do merge-mining, run both Blockchains at the same time and gain fees from Bitcoin mining, as well as RSK mining (running RSK contracts).’

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2016-08-03.