To appreciate how far Bitcoin has come in its ten years of existence, one can look at just the past three years and how adoption has skyrocketed. What makes this even more impressive is that the Bitcoin’s global reach has been achieved without any form of central governing authority.
With that being said, Bitcoin has had a few helping hands over the years to make it both more usable and further adopted. As the original blockchain, and the first blockchain use case, Bitcoin is very basic – yet robust.
It has had the helping hand of the Lightning Network push its adoption as a more usable currency – rather than just a store of value, and it also has other companies, like RSK, who are looking to reach new markets, showing Bitcoin to be more adaptable.
RSK is a company well known for brining smart contract functionality to Bitcoin, as well as its merge mining platform, which is another significant tool for the adoption and appreciation of Bitcoin. To understand merged mining, it allows Bitcoin miners not to need any additional equipment or capabilities to mine the platform’s utility token, RBTC, and therefore maintain the network security.
By allowing this to happen, Bitcoin miners can accrue fees from transactions taking place on the complementary sidechain without expending additional effort or relying on more resources, and the rewards have also recently been bumped up significantly.
Through their own globalized drive of recent key partnerships, RSK hopes that the uptick in their work will be of benefit to Bitcoin and help increase people’s awareness of the cryptocurrency, but also its usability.
Pushing the envelope
The news of the recent partnerships and expansion globally appears to be quite shrewd. A big decision was for RSK’s parent company, IOV Labs, to acquire Latin American social network site Taringa. The platform is a 30 million strong network with over 1,000 active online communities.
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With access to so many active users, RSK is of the belief it can go a long way to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem.
We believe that integrating blockchain technologies and economies into existing social networks, with millions of users, can be an important gateway for their participation in the emerging internet of value. Through the acquisition of Taringa!, we intend on receiving immediate feedback on our features, to improve them together with the community as we go along, and to extend the entire Bitcoin ecosystem,
said RSK CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldivar in an interview to BitcoinMagazine last month.
But the project is not only looking at South America as they have also partnered with Japan’s biggest blockchain accelerator Binary Star and opened an innovation studio in San Francisco.
More so, an ecosystem fund has been set up in order to help foster companies that have similar ideas in regards to Bitcoin adoption. Three companies, namely Vega, Multis, and Pocket Network, have already benefited from the first round of investments.
Another important move, as it pertains to government backing, is that RSK has partnered with Singapore’s Tribe accelerator. This accelerator is backed by the government with the primary goal of having government agencies, corporates, and local startups build on its smart contracts platform.
All of these moves are helping expand RSK and its reach, but on a grander level, it is helping the decentralized Bitcoin network also enter into the frame of entirely new global audiences.
Decidedly decentralized
In fact, the notion of decentralization is an important one for RSK. They feel that the drive towards adopting Bitcoin is partly because of the feeling that decentralization won’t let the people down as much as centralized forces have been in the recent past.
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Zalvidar even explained, within the Taringa acquisition, that they want to empower people with decentralization.
“We see Taringa! as the first step towards massive adoption of both RSK and RIF platforms, and a great step forward for our long term vision of empowering individuals through decentralization,” he said. “We can’t wait to share more news about the first products very soon, as we continue building the internet of value.”
