Blockstream’s Liquid Network Launches for the BTC Blockchain

One of the major setbacks for the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies has been the difficulty and slow nature of crypto settlements, especially where large volumes of these digital assets are involved. There have of course been attempts at fixing this problem with the so-called sidechains that promise faster transactions but the pace of the developments has not been as reassuring as many people had hoped for. The Lightning Network, for instance, has managed to gain quite a lot of traction in the past several months but its use of nodes with limited capacities has been quite detrimental to its growth, to say the least.

Now, Blockstream, a San Francisco-based blockchain technology company may have finally found a solution to the problem. Referred to as the Liquid Network, the company’s new bitcoin sidechain is set to revolutionize the crypto space by allowing for faster and more secure digital currency and asset settlements with an emphasis on the larger volume settlements. The sidechain which will be connecting institutions, crypto exchanges, and even brokers partnered with 20 exchanges at launch, a move that is certainly bound to improve its standing in the crypto space and speed up its adoption at the same time.

“Liquidity across exchanges is definitively not there yet. With the advent of Liquid — with faster settlement times — we should be able to improve it by making it faster and easier to transfer,” Samson Mow, Blockstream’s Chief Strategy officer said.

How It Works

According to Samson Mow, the members of the Liquid Network and the exchanges will be the main providers of liquidity since they will be the ones responsible for keeping a balance of L-BTC that they would, in turn, allow their users to swap. The Liquid Network’s design is a bit of a twist of the original concept of the sidechain which was initially pitched as a means for trustless swaps – Blockstream’s spin requires the intermediaries to execute the swaps themselves.

“When someone wants to move BTC to the Liquid sidechain,” Mow went on to explain. “they send it to a unique peg-in address. When someone is ready to move their money back to the Bitcoin blockchain, they can make a peg-out transaction that will tell the [Liquid members] to send Bitcoin to the desired address.”

Contrary to what many people would assume, the Liquid Network is not a replacement of the Lightning Network. In fact, in the blog post that announced the launch of the project, Blockstream clarified that the Liquid Network is capable of adding the Lightning Network as a second layer which makes the two technologies complimentary as both of them are vital to the crypto ecosystem.