Major developments for RIF and Rootstock announced on stage at Consensus 2023

Austin, Texas – April 26, 2023 – At this year's Consensus event, Tim Paymans, VP Product at IOV Labs, announced a series of major developments focused on supporting the growth of the Rootstock ecosystem alongside a refined focus and new look for the open source Rootstock Infrastructure Framework (RIF). 

During the talk, two major developments for RIF were revealed:

1. Five complimentary Product Development Workshops for businesses looking to use blockchain technology and the RIF protocols to develop and launch innovative fintech products. Partners selected for the programme will be given access to product experts, Rootstock developers, funding and marketing support.

2. A new visual identity for RIF to better reflect its purpose; to accelerate the development of useful, affordable, and scalable fintech products and services on the blockchain. 

RIF is an open source set of tools, technologies and protocols that make it easy to develop accessible and user-friendly finance services on top of the Rootstock sidechain.  

RIF was designed to help developers and financial pioneers solve real, everyday challenges for users. The suite of open source technologies act as the building blocks for creating applications that make it possible to pay, send, save and borrow money in a secure, simple and affordable way.

During his talk at Consensus 2023, Tim Paymans explained why IOV Labs originally created RIF and how the organisation planned to continue supporting the development of the decentralized protocols: 

"Our vision at IOVLabs is a safe and equitable global financial system that enables everyone to participate and prosper. We believe the best way to make this vision a reality is by putting the tools, technology, and resources directly in the hands of the builders, founders, and financial organizations on the front line of the future of finance.

In addition to the RIF developments, Tim Paymans also announced that IOVLabs will be launching a $2.5m grant programme for startups and developers to build DeFi applications on top of Rootstock, the world's most secure, permissionless and censorship-resistant Bitcoin sidechain. IOVLabs aims to distribute 100 grants this year with a goal of supporting founders and entrepreneurs building the future of finance. The grants program will be launched in the coming weeks.

On the news, Pei Chen, IOVLabs VP Growth commented:

"IOVLabs' investment in the Rootstock strategic grants program reflects our commitment to supporting the development of a decentralized financial ecosystem through community effort."

"Over 1 billion people lack access to financial services worldwide. RIF aims to change this by reducing the complexity of decentralized finance and making it accessible to all."

Enterprises, entrepreneurs, and developers can use the open-source RIF suite to build new services or integrate crypto into existing products and can submit their interest to co-create a product with RIF. 

IOVLabs exists to lay the foundation for financial inclusion.  Part of this work includes supporting the growth of decentralised protocols like Rootstock and RIF as part of its vision of a safe and equitable global financial system that enables everyone to participate and prosper.

About RIF 

RIF is short for Rootstock Infrastructure Framework. It's a set of open source protocols, SDKs and services that make developing decentralized finance applications on Rootstock blockchain that are speedy, safe and scalable.

RIF bridges the gap between complex blockchain technology and seamless user experience. It helps organizations create next generation DeFi products, by providing the infrastructure and resources needed to solve key user accessibility and usability challenges.

Developers and businesses use RIF as the building blocks of groundbreaking financial services that pull the world towards global financial system that works for everyone regardless of where they live. 

About Rootstock

Rootstock is the world's most secure, permissionless and censorship-resistant Bitcoin sidechain. It provides EVM-compatible smart contract functionality using bitcoin as the native asset. Rootstock takes Bitcoin from a simple store of value and turns it into the foundations of a fully fledged decentralised financial system. 

Rootstock's native token RBTC is known as "Smart Bitcoin" and lets users use their BTC to interact with a range of services on the Rootstock Bitcoin layer 2. RBTC is an exact 1:1 peg with BTC. (1 RBTC = 1 BTC) When you transfer bitcoin into Rootstock, your bitcoin is locked and the equivalent amount released as RBTC.

Rootstock is a Bitcoin sidechain that provides EVM-compatible smart contract functionality using bitcoin as the native asset. Rootstock is the most permissionless and censorship-resistant Bitcoin sidechain. People around the world use Rootstock every day to interact with a range of DeFi protocols such as Sovryn, Tropykus and stablecoin Money on Chain. 

Rootstock is permissionless, and its consensus mechanism is merge-mined proof of work (PoW) with over 50% of Bitcoin's hash power currently mining Rootstock. This means that Rootstock is mined by more hashpower than any other chain, except Bitcoin itself.

RBTC is used as gas to pay for smart contract execution on the network, such as the transaction fee for trading Rootstock ecosystem tokens, the same way as ETH is used as gas for Ethereum. Unlike other blockchain native tokens, Rootstock is non-custodial and maintains the censorship resistance of Bitcoin.