Decentralized Exchange SushiSwap Goes Live on Bitcoin Sidechain Rootstock

Decentralized exchange SushiSwap is now live on Bitcoin (BTC) sidechain Rootstock, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Thursday.

Launching in 2018, Rootstock is one of the most established projects aiming to introduce decentralized finance (DeFi) features to the Bitcoin network that are more commonly associated with the likes of Ethereum and BNB Chain.

It bills itself as the first Bitcoin sidechain compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). An EVM is a smart contract-executing software that powers the Ethereum protocol, comparable to an operating system on a computer.

Rootstock’s goal is to combine the security of the Bitcoin network with the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum to provide a platform for building and deploying decentralized applications (dApps).

The ecosystem uses the RBTC token, which is pegged 1:1 with BTC.

The integration comes around six months after Uniswap was deployed on the Bitcoin sidechain. SushiSwap began life as a fork to Uniswap.

Rootstock’s bridged total value locked (TVL) sits at just over $450 million, according to data by DeFi Llama.

Since the start of 2023, there has been an acceleration in the expansion of features to the Bitcoin network that have historically been the domain of Ethereum and others.

The starting point was the Ordinals protocol, which allowed a version of NFTs to be minted and store on Bitcoin, from which there have been numerous initiatives to make progress introducing smart contracts to the world’s largest blockchain.

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