Users can now send and receive Liquid BTC (L-BTC) through a wallet, connected to their own node and watch transactions themselves on Blocksteam’s new block explorer.

The average trader

You may think that Liquid is just another institutional product but, according to Blocksteam CEO Adam Back, “it is for traders, storing L-BTC in a liquid wallet ready to deposit in a minute or so into any liquid supporting exchange is an alternative to storing BTC in exchange custody”.

It is already in use, and some people have been using L-BTC in their own wallets from rock trading. Liquid will deliver faster transaction settlement and privacy above the higher security and decentralisation offered by the base BTC blockchain.

“For cold storage and censorship-resistant payments you want to use Bitcoin main chain, for retail payments (fast, cheap) lightning is better,” says Back.

Other features include no analytics scripts, no tracking and native support for SegWit.

The supply of LBTC will fluctuate based on the amount of BTC ‘pegged’ into and out of the sidechain. Users will need to wait for 102 Bitcoin confirmation (around 17 hours) to have their LBTC credited.

Privacy back

Privacy is all the rage at the moment. We have seen upgrades from Monero (with bulletproofs) and Ethereum is also talking about the implementation of ZK-snarks in the serenity upgrade to PoS (Serenity is the combination of Sharding + Casper). Liquid’s implementation of confidential transaction uses confidential and Bech32 addresses.

Blocksteam’s CSO Samson Mow announced on Twitter: “We’re bringing privacy back”.