As a company orientated in developing Bitcoin’s technology, Blockstream launched a Liquid network in October 2018. Last week, we became witnesses to the very first Liquid Bitcoin sidechain available on the market. The code and the duplicated full nodes are now available for all the users. This release includes trading and managing liquid assets and also a wallet for the sidechain’s utility L-BTC token.
What is Liquid ?
This is a sidechain of the original Bitcoin network with innovative nature. It performs faster transactions between both single users and companies. What is more here is the ability to operate with privacy functions and hide your transactions. There’s no condition to perform always anonymous but if you want to, you can. This is what makes Liquid so attractive. It expected to be more than welcome by financial institutions as a powerful tool.
Another confidential aspect is masking the different assets, which means that only the participant in the transaction will be aware of it. It still able to be verified, simply without revealing the asset’s origin. In addition, Liquid still relies on pseudonymous identities, which is providing the necessary protection for all kind of transactions.
What Liquid features to expect?
Liquid is going to provide the opportunity to use a block explorer to monitor your transactions on the sidechain. Built on the Bitcoin’s main net, Liquid expand the original BTC’s privacy features. It allows faster deposits to exchanges for traders.
Ultimately, you might want to become a Liquid full node? This would mean to verify and confirm a transaction, without actually knowing what’s inside them. Node operators, locally storing the blockchain will be able to broadcast information about the sidechain’s state. Finally, the team is planning a lot of other features to add to become more accessible.
How to use Liquid?
If you’re willing to try the Liquid assets, you should create yourself a wallet and register into an exchange supporting Liquid services. At this moment, it’s only The Rock Trading representative which is live, but much more will soon start supporting the L-BTC token. What you can do next is to send or receive assets by interacting only with users, who use the same Liquid feature.
More advances out there? If you’re using a peg-in RPC API, you should peg it out, because this way only you can profit the Liquid hardware wallets or exchanges.
Bottom line
Blockstream company is currently negotiating to integrate their feature in hardware and web wallets to provide a graphic user interface support. By extending privacy features, Liquid Bitcoin is able to offer a solution that is a perfect match for both commercial and personal usage. It’s expected to attract a new wave of users to the crypto sphere.