Although the Bitcoin network is not programmable, it serves as an excellent settlement layer for building robust applications on top of it.says Hiro CEO Alex Miller.
Hiro provides Bitcoin development tools for developers to build on the Stacks blockchain. Miller said that Stacks inherits the security of the Bitcoin network through a consensus mechanism called proof-of-transfer. (although this is a controversial statement for some).
Miller told Cointelegraph that the value proposition behind building programs on Bitcoin is that it is a “really well-established, well-accepted and very reliable settlement layer“.
He added that because of this, it is a much simpler blockchain to build on compared to most other smart contract platforms that do computation and settlement on the same layer:
“When you have settlement and calculation on the same layer, it complicates things in many ways. […] You don’t want to modify the settlement layer as much.”
That allows developers to “innovate faster” in a layer 2, which “has much, much more robust capabilities”.
Miller claimed that It should come as no surprise that developers are making Bitcoin programmable as that is what Satoshi Nakomoto envisioned.:
“Satoshi himself wrote in 2010, 2011, that he foresaw that additional layers would be built [y] extra strings on top of this, to provide all that kind of programmability.”
Miller said that Stacks’ developer ecosystem has grown rapidly since the platform’s launch in January 2021“we have hundreds of developers that are working on the ecosystem, and thousands of smart contracts and applications that have been deployed on it.”
In the first year of launch, the Stacks blockchain achieved more than 350 million monthly API requests, 40,000 Hiro wallet downloads, and deployed 2,500 Clarity smart contracts.and those numbers will continue to rise in 2022.
Miller also said that we will live in a “multi-chain future” without any platform governing smart contracts in particular. “Ethereum is going to be around for a while at least, but there are a lot of other smart contract platforms that haven’t stood the test of time yet,” she said.
As for where the cryptocurrency market is headed, Miller said that the volatility of cryptocurrencies will decrease when crypto applications become more “accepted, integrated and used in our society”and added that:
“Bringing programmability and smart contracts to the Bitcoin network helps drive further adoption of Bitcoin as a technical and financial layer in our society, reducing volatility while driving price in the long run.”
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