We’re excited to announce we are open sourcing the RSK platform client today. We’re very happy to share all the work we’ve done so far and the challenges we face in a more open way.

This release, codenamed Ginger, is the first step to bring smart contracts into the Bitcoin ecosystem, based on three main pillars of the RSK platform: an EVM-compatible virtual machine -RSK smart contracts are programmed on Solidity and RSK VM is fully compatible with Ethereum VM-, a merge-mined blockchain -which enables Bitcoin miners to mine on both chains at the same time with the same resources and with no performance harm on Bitcoin mining- and 2-way peg with Bitcoin -RSK uses Bitcoin as its native currency-.

As part of this milestone, we are also making Testnet available to the public. The Testnet will enable testing your applications with your own node in a network similar to the upcoming  production-ready network, or Mainnet. Our focus during this stage is to make sure the network is stable before going live, and so you can before releasing your code. We will also undergo several security audits to be sure the software is not only stable, but also secure.

This is the first of many releases yet to come. We will regularly update the Github repository with improvements. Our team is already working on features that will soon be available. You can visit our repository to find out what our plans are, what improvements are waiting in the development pipeline and the issues we have already identified.

Collaboration is essential to continue growing the RSK community and this is the time to join us. We welcome feedback, bug reports, improvements, ideas and all kind of contributions.

We want to thank all the partners that have been working on the private version of the Testnet during the last few months, for their unvaluable feedback and findings, and their collaboration to make RSK platform better. We are also thankful to the EthereumJ and BitcoinJ communities for their contributions to the project.

Please reach out with any feedback you would like to share with us. You can contact us directly in the Gitter community. If you want to report bugs or request new features, please create your own issues in the Github repository, we’ll be happy to discuss them with you. You may also want to check our “Starting with RSK” guide to find out how to start working on the RSK platform.

What are you waiting for? Go and get the code!