With the hype around Bitcoin layer 2s, Rootstock, the first and longest-lasting Bitcoin sidechain, established itself as the leading blockchain these three months, with record-breaking transactions and the integration of several new dApps, bridges, and wallets. This momentum has propelled Rootstock into the next step of its growth journey and a plan has been put in place to see further growth and improvements over the next 12 months.
According to block explorer data, there have been over 13 million transactions, to date, on the Rootstock network, with over 670,000 transactions in the last 3 months alone. The data also shows why Rootstock is an excellent place to start building on Bitcoin with over 60% of Bitcoin’s hash rate securing the network, and an uptime of 100% since its launch in January 2018.
On the integration front, just over the last three months alone, over 25 dApps and protocols have been integrated into the Rootstock ecosystem providing users with new ways to access, build, and grow on Rootstock. The complete list includes the following:
- Artoshi; Bitget; Chainport; Dega; Etherspot; Galxe; Gelato; iZUMi; Kickspad; L bank Exchange; LiFi; Merkl; oooo; OpenOcean; Rubic; Sailing; Satoshi; SimpleFi; Steer; SuperLauncher; SushiSwap; Umbrella; UniFi; Uniswap
Looking forward, Rootstock core contributors and community members have proposed a 12-month roadmap for Rootstock, with improvements and new features contributed by developers across the entire Rootstock ecosystem, which will allow ecosystems built on top of it, such as the RIF ecosystem, to keep on developing new tools and protocols useful for Rootstock developers. This roadmap includes a range of Rootstock Improvement Proposals (RSKIPs) focused on increasing transaction speed, improving usability, and further decentralizing the network.
Highlights include:
- Reducing transaction confirmation times from 30 to just 5 seconds – significantly speeding up the network
- Enabling non-custodial swaps between Lightning Network (LN-BTC) and Rootstock (RBTC) via Boltz
- Evolving PowPeg into a SegWit-compatible 2-Way Peg, increasing the number of entities overseeing Bitcoin transaction signing to over 60 and reducing peg-out fees
- A Bitcoin native assets bridge that allows Runes tokens to freely flow between the Bitcoin mainchain and Rootstock
- Preparing the development of a truly trust-minimized Bitcoin/Rootstock bridge that will harness BitVMX and will not require changes to the Bitcoin consensus protocol
When looking back on the last three months of momentum, Henrik Jondell, Chief Technology Officer at RootstockLabs, a key contributor to the Rootstock blockchain, commented “The last three months have been an important time for the successful growth of Rootstock and we are thrilled to see how the next twelve months will pan out. Rootstock has become one of the most used Bitcoin layer 2 for crypto and the increase in features and accessibility over this quarter has only helped expand its reach.”
About Rootstock
Rootstock is the world’s most secure smart contract platform that is cryptographically connected to the Bitcoin blockchain. Known as a Bitcoin sidechain, Rootstock uses a censorship-resistant two-way peg to allow users to send Bitcoin directly to the Rootstock chain which is then converted into smart Bitcoins (RBTC) on the Rootstock blockchain. These RBTC can be used to deploy or to interact with smart contracts and dApps on the Rootstock blockchain. BTC can be easily moved back to the Bitcoin mainchain at any point using the trustless bridge or through a variety of protocols such as Sovryn FastBTC.