RSK Labs recently announced that BTC.com has completed its merged-mining integration on the RSK MainNet Network. This implies that one of the largest mining pool companies is now providing its hashing power to validate and secure RSK sidechain’s transactions.

RSK is the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the Bitcoin miners via merge-mining, allowing them to actively participate in the Smart Contract revolution. Their goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability.

The platform’s blockchain is secured by merge-mining, which means that they can achieve the same security as Bitcoin in terms of double-spend prevention and settlement finality. The 2way peg security will first rely on a federation holding custody of bitcoins and later switch to an automatic peg when the community accepts the security trade-offs of the automatic peg.

We are happy to announce that @btccom_official Pool miners can now merge mine @RSKsmart (RSK) next to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash! 🔥#Bitcoin https://t.co/r3E0szUbiG — BTC.com (@btccom_official) July 18, 2018

The RSK platform’s virtual machine (VM) is backward compatible with the Ethereum VM which adds even more depth to the system. This past spring, at the Consensus event in New York, RSK Labs co-founder Gabriel Kurman revealed that the sidechain was now secured by 1 in 10 BTC miners. Furthermore, there’s been a few walkthroughs and step-by-step guides on how developers can build smart contracts using the RSK network.

As most of the prominent Bitcoin mining pools implementing and testing the merged-mining plugin, the upcoming integration represents one more step toward increasing the RSK network security level.

When asked about this new development, RSK’s CEO, Adrian Eidelman said: “We are excited to announce that after having completed the testing phase with BTC.com, we implemented the merged-mining plugin on RSK MainNet with no loss of efficiency in our partner’s regular Bitcoin mining operation.”

Earlier this week RSK Labs launched a public infrastructure service that enables decentralized application (Dapp) creations without the infrastructure installation process. Essentially programmers won’t need to install specific infrastructure components so they build Dapps on the RSK network on-demand.