London, September 2017. BIP175 Pay-to-Contract protocol went into draft status earlier this month and is an implementation of the work on homomorphic payment addresses and the pay-to-contract protocol by Ijah Gerhardt and Timo Hanke in 2012. The new BIP can potentially open up Bitcoin to use cases not previously achievable on the public Bitcoin blockchain.

The protocol is designed to mimic real-world payment interactions between merchants and customers whilst ensuring only the merchant and customer have cryptographic proof of who is being paid and for what. This has been achieved via a multiparty key derivation scheme by extending BIP-0032 (Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets).

“We believe that BIP175 is one of the first building blocks to truly decentralise finance“ Nicholas Gregory, CommerceBlock

CommerceBlock’s product offerings provide a suite of tools that enables anyone to build and use services that construct contracts, manage trade flows, engage in multiparty dispute management, issue assets, and hedge currency risk. Developers and end users will be able to manage all stages of a business interaction and fulfil their contractual obligations by utilising the CommerceBlock platform.

Although currently implemented over Bitcoin the technology is blockchain agnostic and can be applied to any public blockchain as required.

Visit CommerceBlock.com for more information on the BIP and the CommerceBlock platform implementing the technology.