RSK is enticing Ethereum developers onto their Bitcoin-backed sidechain

The team at Rootstock (RSK) have reiterated their desire to maintain compatibility with Ethereum’s main smart contracting language.

In the blog post, the RSK team said that “it’s among our best interests to provide compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts, and we work hard every day to accomplish this goal.”

Competing with Ethereum

It’s an interesting move to maintain compatibility with its main rivals programing language. The platform is hoping to entice developers and projects to switch over from ethereum to the RSK network – with the promises of higher transaction throughput, faster block confirmation times and of course, security backed by the Bitcoin blockchain.

Merge-mining and a federation

The open-source smart contract platform has a two-way peg into the Bitcoin blockchain. The project logo includes the tagline a “smarter Bitcoin”.

Their blockchain is secured by a combination of two security measures. Firstly the RSK blockchain is merge-mined by the Bitcoin network miners. Jameson Lopp recently commented on Twitter that since the sidechain launched (in January 2018), “it’s now merge mined by 43% of bitcoin’s hashrate.”

In addition to this, a ‘federation’ of 25 trusted Bitcoin companies provide an extra layer of security, by issuing security checkpointing as part of the security consensus for the network.

RSK’s stated goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability.

Ethereum’s Solidity

Solidity is a contact-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts. It is one of the four scripting languages designed to work on the EVM (ethereum virtual machine).

At present, Solidity is the primary programming language on Ethereum. As well as RSK it is also used on a number of other private and public blockchains, competing in the smart contract space.

New RSK release soon

The compatibility announcement from RSK came on the back of the team recently discovering some incompatibilities between the RSK VM (virtual machine) and contracts written in the Ethereum smart contracting language Solidity.

“We’re very close to having a new RSK version released, which solves these incompatibilities. In the meantime, we urge smart contract developers not to deploy in RSK Mainnet contracts written in Solidity versions 0.5.0 and higher, until further notice.”

The team expect to release the new RSK release in the next two weeks.