Learning about Rootstock and how they unlock smart contracts for Bitcoin

GM, GM. Welcome to what is going to be another fantastic DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders, hackers, founders, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase what they've built to other similar-minded folks in web3. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Rootstock co-founder Adrian Eidelman. So if you didn't know, Rootstock is a smart contract platform that operates as a sidechain to the Bitcoin network, bringing smart contract functionality similar to Ethereum's to Bitcoin. It allows developers to create and run decentralized applications with the security that the Bitcoin network provides as a foundation. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll see Adrian dive into how Rootstock enables EVM smart contracts for Bitcoin, unlocking game-changing possibilities for developers to create cutting-edge decentralized apps. All right, let's get into it.

[Music plays] GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Adrian. Ecstatic to have you on today.

Thank you, Narb. Thanks for having me.

Certainly, certainly. Yeah, we were sad to miss you last week, but we're glad to have you back, back in tiptop shape today. And yeah, we're very excited to learn more about Rootstock. But before we get into all of the awesomeness you have prepared for us, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself if folks aren't familiar?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so I have a background in software engineering, I would say. I studied software engineering in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And I had been working with software development teams for more than 20 years now. I would say I got into Bitcoin around 2012 or 2013. I had some friends that were already very excited about the technology and the possibilities it brought, especially in places like we are from, where there is a clear need for this kind of decentralized technology. So, yeah, so they helped me get excited about it as well. I started studying a little bit about it until 2014, I would say, where I kind of formally started working on Bitcoin together with some friends and colleagues that ended up being my business partners in Rootstock. At first, working on Bitcoin itself and trying to learn and bring new ideas into Bitcoin, but we quickly realized that the tools we needed to build on Bitcoin were not there back in the day. It was very hard to find people building on Bitcoin. So I would say we decided to build those tools ourselves and that's how Rootstock started. And yeah, I've been working on that since that day, since formally, I would say, 2015 until today, focused on Rootstock and making Bitcoin better.

Wow, that's amazing. So it was really more of a, "Oh, I want to do all these cool things with Bitcoin, but I'm so limited with what's available to me as a toolset," that really spurred you on to start Rootstock, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there is, as I was telling you before, there is a clear need for like some very basic financial services in places like Argentina where we saw Bitcoin as a good match. Whether that's, I don't know, lending protocols or savings, very basic things that a lot of people do not have access to in places like where I am from. So given that we were excited about Bitcoin, we say, well, looks like again, there is kind of a match here, but yeah, it was very hard to build those kind of things because the infrastructure was not there. So that was kind of what triggered the idea of creating Rootstock.

Excellent, excellent. And as you were going through this journey building Rootstock, like what kinds of experiences would you say would you remember as highlights building up to this point that really helped you become a better founder and really push Rootstock beyond your initial vision?

Yeah, I mean, it's been quite a long journey, I would say, although it's only, yeah, 10 years probably, a little bit less. I think what comes to my mind first is how the vision we had back in the day is still very valid today. Now you see a lot of much more activity working on Bitcoin layers in the last one or two years that it's very, I think it makes me feel very happy that we had that vision back in the day. But of course, it's much, much harder when you don't have like an ecosystem, a community building the way you want that to happen, right? So, yeah, I think that's one of the things that kind of comes to my mind first as I was saying, of how things evolve and yeah, how everything is going much faster now with a lot of exciting projects being built on Bitcoin. But as I told you before, it's been kind of a long journey, but everything is still very valid, like the idea of, okay, building a new, let's say, or a better financial system on top of Bitcoin is more valid than ever, I would say today.

100 percent. And it's a marathon, not a sprint. So you got to enjoy the ride as you go along. But I guess that's a great segue for us to get into the content you have prepared for us.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I will bring that on stage now. And there you go, the floor is yours. I will just say, folks, if you're watching this live, please post your questions for Adrian and Rootstock in the chat and we will bring them up towards the end. And with that, go for it, Adrian.

Amazing. Thank you very much, Narb. So, yeah, the idea for the presentation today is to give a very brief intro to what Rootstock is. As I said before, we started working on this a long time ago, almost 10 years ago, but a lot of new things are happening on Bitcoin layers now. So we usually see people, many people that are not aware about what Rootstock is. So I wanted to give a very quick presentation about Rootstock today. But of course, to understand Rootstock, it's probably worth giving a little bit of intro to Bitcoin. Everyone knows what Bitcoin is, but the important thing here is that Bitcoin is the first public blockchain network and it basically lets users send and receive value through the internet without requiring any intermediary, right? So it's something that sounds simple, but it's basically what makes Bitcoin revolutionary. Mainly because it's the first time in history that we can send value over long distances almost instantaneously and without the need to trust intermediaries, to trust any central authority. And that's quite powerful.

But of course, while Bitcoin is a powerful and revolutionary technology, there are certain limitations associated with it. There are things that Bitcoin cannot do. And these are the limitations that gave birth to new technologies that would enable certain use cases that Bitcoin does not support. Some examples of those are privacy, faster payments, smart contracts, and so on, right? So the truth is that innovation could actually happen on Bitcoin. However, bringing those changes to the consensus protocol of Bitcoin must be handled in a very conservative way. And as a consequence, Bitcoin usually does not adapt to new demands and innovation that fast, right? So as I was saying before, there is a lot of like new excitement around Bitcoin layers and how to bring new capabilities to Bitcoin. But actually there was, there were people working on this for some time now. And it was in 2014, if I'm not wrong, that a company called Blockstream published a paper that is called "Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains."

And basically what they did is to propose the idea of enabling Bitcoins to be transferred between blockchains with the goal of giving users access to new capabilities, to new use cases using the asset they already own, right? And that was kind of one of the important milestones for us to think of building Rootstock. That paper includes the picture that you can see now on screen. It's a quite popular picture. Probably not that relevant to understand every single piece there, but the important thing here is that it gives a visual idea of what a sidechain is, right? As you can see, a sidechain works as a separate blockchain and connects to another blockchain through a bridge, right? Through what is usually called a two-way peg, right? But the important thing is that this paper kind of introduced this idea of sidechains, of how to bring new capabilities to Bitcoin, right?

In our understanding, a sidechain meets or needs to satisfy three main conditions. The first one is that there is a token that it's pegged to the parent chain token in a way that permits secure transfers between both chains, right? In the case of Rootstock, that works as a sidechain as we will see in a couple of minutes, this pegged asset is basically Bitcoin. That's kind of the first condition. The second one is that there is no other token needed for this sidechain to work or to function, right? And the third condition is that the sidechain is a separate blockchain that it's independent from the parent chain. That's what at least ourselves from Rootstock Labs, we understand as a sidechain. And of course, all these conditions are met by Rootstock. As I was saying, it has a native token pegged to Bitcoin. We call it RBTC. It's pegged one to one. And Rootstock does not require any other token other than RBTC to function. And Rootstock is independent of the Bitcoin network, although of course it has two big points of contact with Bitcoin that I will cover afterwards that kind of puts Rootstock very, very close to Bitcoin.

As I was saying before, one of the things that Bitcoin does not enable is smart contracts. Actually, this is a little bit, I mean, it can be debated whether Bitcoin enables smart contracts or doesn't. But the important thing here is that the limitations that Bitcoin has in its programming or scripting language, there are a lot of things that cannot be achieved on Bitcoin. But very, very briefly for the audience that is not that familiar with the concept, I like explaining smart contracts, or they can be seen from two different perspectives, I would say. One is money that can include certain behavior or rules or business logic. Or it can be understood as also as a program that is attached to money, right? So one easy way to understand what smart contracts are is using the concept of programmable money, right? So for example, very, very silly example, the one that you can see on the slide, let's say I send you, Narb, 100 bucks, $100, but you will only be able to spend them at a coffee shop, or certain coffee shop. And the smart contracts can basically validate that you are trying to use that money in the coffee shop, if not, the transaction will not go through, right? That's a very simple idea of including business logic or business rules into a transaction. And that's what you can build, like a very simple but powerful, I would say, example of what you can do with smart contracts, right?

And as I was saying before, these are the kind of things that are not very easy to do on Bitcoin. Many reasons for that, but basically the limitations on the Bitcoin scripting language, that it's not Turing complete, you have limited resources, you have no persistent memory. So those kind of things cannot be done easily on Bitcoin. Although you can do other things, very interesting things on Bitcoin as well, you can do multi-sig transactions, time-lock contracts, and those kind of things, but it's quite limited. And you can do a lot of things with more powerful smart contract platforms like escrow services, domain registry, crowdfunding, and so on and so forth. So the idea of Rootstock is that, or the idea that we had back in the day is that it would be awesome to have all this expressiveness that, for example, Ethereum can have in their blockchain or in their smart contracts. But why would you build this as a competition to Bitcoin? Why don't we build this for Bitcoin? That was kind of the original vision and the idea of building Rootstock, which it's basically a sidechain, as you, Narb, said at the beginning, that extends Bitcoin with Ethereum-compatible smart contract functionality. So anything that you can run on Ethereum, you can run that on Rootstock, but the difference is that to transact on Rootstock, you will need Bitcoin, right? It's, you won't need any other token or any other token that competes with Bitcoin.

Why? Well, I've already said that, but basically what we wanted to do is to enable new use cases on Bitcoin using smart contracts, let users build dApps, different types of dApps, because this is kind of a general-purpose blockchain. But also, a very important thing is that we wanted to contribute to Bitcoin, right? And not compete with Bitcoin. And for example, something that we will see in a minute, one of the important things of Rootstock is that it contributes to Bitcoin security budget by providing Bitcoin miners with rewards, right? If they provide security to the network. And also, as I said before, all by using the Bitcoin token with no pre-mining and without the need of a different token rather than Bitcoin. Again, this probably sounds more obvious now because you see many other platforms trying to achieve this, but it was not that obvious back in the day, back in 2015, and especially when we launched Rootstock in 2018. So there are basically four main pillars of the Rootstock blockchain network. I mentioned them already. It's an EVM-compatible smart contract platform. It has a Bitcoin peg, which is basically the bridge that lets you move your Bitcoins into Rootstock and back and forth. It's secured by Bitcoin proof-of-work through a technique called merged mining, and it's a high-volume and low-latency network for fast transactions.

Very, very quickly, the two main points of, like, contact or connection with Bitcoin are the two-way peg, the mechanism by which Bitcoins are transferred between Bitcoin and Rootstock, and merged mining, which is the mechanism by which new blocks are created on Rootstock using the same hashing power coming from Bitcoin miners. I will probably go a little bit faster here because we will not have time to go into details about how the two-way peg works. Probably the important thing here is the process of getting in and getting out of Bitcoin into Rootstock. When you move from Bitcoin to Rootstock is what we call a peg-in, and when we go from RBTC, from Rootstock to Bitcoin, it's what we call a peg-out. And there is a like a parity of one Bitcoin equals one RBTC, right? Let me skip this a little bit because it will take more time. I think the important concept here is that for this two-way peg bridge to work, it requires a federation. This is how most of the bridges work today. The federation is the set of entities or crypto companies that are overseeing the process. They are looking into both blockchains to let this process work. There is a lot of, and this comes from the limitation that Bitcoin has because you cannot, at least until today, you cannot run any computation on Bitcoin. However, we have a team currently working and there are other teams in the space as well working on achieving this, being able to run any computation optimistically on the Bitcoin blockchain. That would eventually let more decentralized bridges to be built. We're spending a lot of efforts there and hopefully we will see this happening soon. Just in case you want to check it out, probably would be great for a separate session if you look into BitVM, that's something that's really interesting. But for now, most of these bridges work in this federated model, which is, let's say, a more trust-minimized way but not fully decentralized.

And the second important thing is merged mining. Again, the mechanism by which blocks are created on Rootstock. And the important thing here, again, we will not be able to cover how merged mining works. The important thing here is that merged mining is this technique to secure two blockchains at the same time using the same mining hashrate from the Bitcoin miners. So it allows miners to earn additional fees at no additional cost. And in the case of Rootstock, these rewards are paid in Bitcoins on Rootstock. So that's good because, as I said before, it contributes to Bitcoin security budget and it aligns incentives very well. Yeah, I will skip this, like because it requires more time, but it explains how merged mining works. One very relevant thing of merged mining on Rootstock, there are several mining pools already securing the Rootstock network. Some of them are the ones that you can see on the slide. And there is already more than 60 percent of the Bitcoin hashing power also contributing to Rootstock, which it's quite a lot. There are some links there that you can get more information.

So very briefly, Rootstock by the numbers. Rootstock was launched in mainnet in January 2018. There are around 2,700 Bitcoins currently locked. And as I said before, more than 60 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate is being used to secure Rootstock at the same time. And before I end, Narb, if you give me a couple more minutes, I wanted to give some idea to developers because I understand the audience is mostly developers, how you can start working on Rootstock. I think that the most important resource is the developer portal. It has been recently rebranded, redesigned, and it looks great. It's very easy to find information. So you get the link there at dev.rootstock.io. You have a ton of information here. I personally like the quickstarts guide. You have the link there, but if you go to the developer portal, you will easily get to this that shows developers how to start working, yeah, basically how to use different dev tools on Rootstock. As I said before, and I want to emphasize this again, Rootstock is EVM compatible. So if you are already working on an EVM-compatible network, you don't have to learn anything new. You can use the same tools that you use today. You can use Hardhat, you can use Foundry. I think we will be, I'm not sure if I can say this, but I will say it anyway, Alchemy has integrated with Rootstock as well. So the most popular tools, the Graph as well, can be used on Rootstock. And then in the quickstart section, there is a sub-kit that shows you how to do that, also if you're new to web3. You can find a lot of resources there and a list of developer tools as well. And yeah, to show you some links all together, if you want to get more information, go to the developer portal. You can go to Rootstock website at rootstock.io. There is a Discord server where a lot of smart people can help you as well, our GitHub repos, and of course, you can follow me on Twitter as well. So I think that's it, Narb. Thanks so much.

That was wonderful, Adrian. That was very comprehensive and provides a great overview for all of us here watching today to get started with Rootstock. And I would supplement and say additionally to the wonderful documentation you have on Rootstock, dappCamp Dev has created a four-track course as part of our partnership with Rootstock. So definitely you'll also want to check that out if you want a more structured hands-on approach to learning Rootstock to supplement with the documentation that's there. And I'll drop the link there in the chat, but both sets of documentation, sorry, the documentation and the link to the course are in the YouTube description for folks to get their hands dirty with Rootstock. And I should also mention if you're a DD member or Codeholder, you'll definitely want to get your hands dirty with Rootstock because we're going to be offering, ta-da, a grants round starting next week where you can grab up to 5k. Or sorry, there will be up to 5k in grant funding available for builders to take advantage of and build the next great big thing on Rootstock. So definitely you'll want to get going with that this week and beyond. But I do have some questions for you, Adrian, and crowd, if you're watching, please post your questions as well and we'll get through them as quickly as we can. But you briefly touched on it, Adrian. Most people in Developer DAO are Solidity devs already. So Rootstock being an EVM-compatible blockchain, you mentioned that basically the entire toolset that we've already taken the time to learn can be applied and used on Rootstock. And I think that's very powerful in the sense that people don't actually have to learn as much as they would think they'd have to learn to get cooking on Rootstock. Like what have you, like if you were to give a, if you were to try and get Solidity devs excited about that, like what would you tell them to really spark, ignite their passion to start building on Rootstock?

Yeah, I would say that first thing is what you just said, Narb. Rootstock is EVM compatible. Double-clicking on that, I would say that means first, the Rootstock virtual machine implements the same opcodes as Ethereum does. Of course, there can be a few differences mostly coming from the fact that Ethereum, as you probably know, switched to proof-of-stake some time ago. So there are definitely some operations in the Ethereum virtual machine that are specific to how a proof-of-stake system works. And of course, but everything else is, I would say, mostly implemented, or every time Ethereum introduces a new opcode, we quickly introduce that into Rootstock. So the virtual machine works mostly the same. And also there is compatibility at the interface level, which means if you interact with a Rootstock node and interact with the Ethereum node, they look pretty much the same. The JSON-RPC interface provides mostly the same methods. So that's why it's very easy for a Solidity developer to use Rootstock. The main thing why I think it's exciting to work on Rootstock is because of its alignment with Bitcoin. Of course, in our vision, Bitcoin is the real decentralized and secure platform that really exists. So why would you want to build on Bitcoin? Especially if you don't need to learn anything new.

Fair enough and exactly, exactly. Why not up your skills and become that multi-chain developer, right? It's like, exactly, exactly. I guess on that note, what types of things are you really looking forward to seeing people build on Rootstock? Like I'm sure there's been some things that have caught your eye up to this point. Maybe you can touch on that as well, but is there anything that you're really looking looking for to see people build, perhaps to get people excited for the grant funding round?

Yeah, that's a great question and probably that's kind of my personal view on that, of course. As I said before, Rootstock is a general-purpose platform, anyone can build anything and that's great. I personally and the founding team, we have been mostly interested in, let's say, in decentralized finance mostly. We see that like a use case that really brings value, especially in our experience growing up in places where that's needed. I'm seeing very interesting use cases around payments, how to simplify payments using devices, yeah, but I would say that the category I like most is that one, like everything like financial use cases that can help people to access these services that are very common in like the traditional banking system, but a lot of people do not have access to. That's what I find most interesting. But of course you can build anything and that's great. I guess there will be people much more creative than me to think of interesting use cases to build.

Awesome, great answer. And yeah, definitely just enabling people to have access to financial tools folks usually take for granted. I think that's very powerful and was one of the main motivators for the entire blockchain space, I would argue. So definitely aligned with you there and really looking forward to people actually building out fundamental apps and use cases for us to enable that on the entire globe. So it's just a matter of time, just a matter of time I would say.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's happening. I mean, but of course everything takes some time.

Exactly. And yeah, unfortunately that brings us to time here, but yeah, this was again a very wonderful and comprehensive overview of Rootstock. Thank you so much, Adrian, for taking your time out of your day to come and present this to us.

No, sure. I mean, very happy to be here. Thanks so much for giving us the space to talk about what excites us most, which is Rootstock and Bitcoin. And yeah, happy to come back whenever you want to extend more on this topic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd love that for sure and looking forward to it. And yeah, I guess with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Monday and hope you have a fantastic rest of your week. For the Canadians watching, happy Thanksgiving to you. Hopefully you're taking some time off, maybe enjoying the show hopefully, and we'll catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell on Friday. Have a good one, folks.

Bye everyone.