Blockstream has announced the release of Liquid Core, a new multi-platform desktop wallet for transacting L-BTC on the Bitcoin-pegged sidechain network Liquid.

In a press release, the team said that “Liquid Core gives traders the tools to deposit and withdraw L-BTC from supporting exchanges, while also allowing them to transact between each other without the need of an intermediary.”

L-BTC transacted on the Liquid network will be fully settled in two minutes, providing traders with access to much faster transactions and more efficient use of capital that is pegged in and out of the Layer-1 Bitcoin blockchain.

Confidential by default

Liquid Core also has Confidential Transactions enabled by default, hiding key transaction details such as asset types and amounts from third parties. Blockstream has said that “this provides much stronger privacy assurances than typical Bitcoin transactions, and reduces the risk of revealing sensitive trade information to competitors.”

Blockstream also mentioned businesses experimenting with Liquid’s Issued Assets will be able to use the new Liquid Core release to “send, receive, and manage multiple Issued Asset balances all from the same Liquid UI.”

Blockstream’s chief architect, Lawrence Nahum, has been using this feature to give out free beer tokens that can be claimed on the liquid.beer website.

Nahum also took to Reddit to give his views on what the key benefits of the network will be, including Confidential Transactions, assets being native to the protocol (with simple atomic swap capabilities), and finally that the sidechain  uses “not only Bitcoin’s stable network as a peg, but Bitcoin’s stable tech in general.”

How is the Liquid network ramping up?

Looking at the Liquid sidechain statistics hosted on liquid.horse, we can see that the network currently has 52 BTC capacity locked into the ‘Liquid Federation Wallet’. This sum represents over $200,000 of value that is locked into the network, which has seen a significant increase in the number of transactions between the network’s federation of participants since the sidechain was launched in November 2018.

An example of recent activity was reported by Agent Horse, who noticed a few weeks ago that “over 1,000 transactions, a quarter of the total, have been created on Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain in the last 24 hours, at a rate of one per minute.”

It’s for traders

Blockstream’s CEO Adam Back reiterated on Reddit that “Liquid is mostly interesting for people who trade on exchanges or do cross-exchange trading as it allows them to deposit funds faster from storage, and move funds across exchanges quickly.”

The launch of the new and easier-to-use interface to interact with the Liquid sidechain looks to be another key infrastructure development for the Liquid network. Earlier this year, Coin Rivet reported on the release of a yen-backed stablecoin on the Liquid network.

It still looks like a way to go before we see exchanges and businesses really start to ramp up activity on the Liquid network, but with what looks to be a product built on the values of privacy, anonymity, and censorship resistance, the idea of a working ‘trustless exchange’ looks like it may become reality sooner rather than later on this rapidly developing Bitcoin-based sidechain.