About the coinRSK is the first open-source smart contract platform that is integrated with Bitcoin through a 2-way peg. It allows Bitcoin miners to participate in the smart contract revolution by rewarding them via merge-mining. The primary goal of RSK is to enhance the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling smart contracts, near-instant payments, and higher scalability.

Main featuresRSK is designed with several key principles in mind. It is Bitcoin-friendly, aiming to support the Bitcoin community and extend the capabilities of Bitcoin by providing a blockchain with a 2-way peg. RSK does not mint or pre-mine coins, ensuring it does not compete with Bitcoin. Security is a top priority, with RSK's blockchain secured by merge-mining, achieving the same level of security as Bitcoin in terms of double-spend prevention and settlement finality. Scalability is another focus, with RSK capable of scaling to 100 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization, using techniques like probabilistic verification and blockchain sharding.

How it worksRSK enables instant payments, which are crucial for new use cases such as retail store payments and online gaming transactions. The platform uses carefully chosen parameters and new theoretical protocols like DECOR+GHOST to create blocks at an average interval of 10 seconds, maintaining a low stale block rate without additional centralization incentives. The security of the 2-way peg initially relies on a federation holding custody of bitcoins, with plans to switch to an automatic peg as the community accepts the associated security trade-offs.