Scaling Bitcoin: RSK

Quick Take
- RSK is a merged-mined chain that leverages the work of the existing Bitcoin miners
- The concept of merge mining indicates some inheritance of Bitcoin’s security but it also relies on additional crypto-economic assumptions
- RSK’s smart contracts are compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing RSK to leverage the existing Ethereum tooling significantly
- RSK helps improve the programmability and transaction throughput for the Bitcoin ecosystem with the use of a Bitcoin pegged representation (RBTC) on RSK
- The use of RBTC on RSK introduces certain trade-offs which may not be optimal for users