RGB Continues Work to Bring Better Smart Contracts to Bitcoin

Under development by the LNP/BP Standards Association, the RGB protocol entered beta in June.The second layer network promises to bring smart contracts and tokenized assets to Bitcoin with a Lightning Network-esque technical design.

As the new smart contract-enabling protocol RGB launches its beta, the folks at the LNP/BP Standards Association are trying to change this perception.

The group is building RGB, a smart contract network built on top of Bitcoin.

RGB was first conceptualized by Bitcoin Core developer and cryptography consultant Peter Todd.

The pursuit of Bitcoin-based smart contracts - and more generally, tokenizing assets on Bitcoin - is nothing new.

For its own part, the Lightning Network's hash time-lock contracts - the technical parameters that lock bitcoin into payment channels on the secondary network - are a form of smart contract.

Zucco said RGB "Leverages the techniques and trade-offs of Lightning," in that assets will be transferred in the same way.

"The RGB design is a client-side validation design. It means that when I send you something, I don't publish the transfer on the network; I send it to you, peer-to-peer, and I will just use the public network to prevent double-spending. You should use the blockchain only to prevent double-spending, but not for transferring assets."

RGB could have a leg up on these forms of NFTs because RGB would allow you to send the computer file for the NFT in the same transaction as the asset that represents it.

"RGB is very private. I cannot follow an RGB asset on the blockchain. Only when you receive an asset do you see the history of the asset, but it's obfuscated cryptographically with Confidential Transactions technology we reused from Blockstream. Once you send an asset, you won't be able to see where it goes afterwards," Zucco told CoinDesk.