An open source project enabling interoperations between bitcoin and Ethereum-based networks has been released by ConsenSys. Among all, the system allows any Ethereum contract to be paid for directly in BTC.

Funded by the Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, the project was adopted by ConsenSys as soon as its developer Joseph Chow joined the company. The project’s functionality includes verification of bitcoin transactions, relaying bitcoin transactions to any Ethereum contract, bitcoin block headers storage and inspection of a latest bitcoin block header stored in the contract.

According to the founder and CEO of ConsenSys Joseph Lubin, the project provides a perspective of joining “various blockchain networks and other decentralized services together into an internet of decentralized systems,” which, thanks to BTC Relay, can be easy to interoperate.

Thus, Ethereum developers can now enable users of their decentralised applications to interact with smart contracts using bitcoin. Moreover, BTC Relay has been added to EtherEx decentralised exchange to help convert bitcoin to Ether “without any counterparty risk.”

Community members who run the software providing BTC Relay with the new bitcoin block header are called Relayers, and, unlike bitcoin miners, they do not need any special hardware or a lot of electric power to run the project.

The issue of an Ethereum-based BTC token (ETHBTC) which would become a “bidirectional bridge” between BTC and ETH has been also announced as planned.

Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin shared his excitement about “the first-ever production release of cross-blockchain communication of this kind”, saying he hoped it would “set an example for interoperating cross-blockchain applications, whether between Bitcoin and Ethereum, other blockchains and Ethereum and public and private or consortium chains, for many years to come.”

ConsenSys is a “venture production studio” focused mainly on Ethereum. The studio specialises in building enterprise solutions, developer tools and decentralised applications powered by smart contracts.





Maria Rudina