5 Projects Enabling Smart Contract Development on Bitcoin
Smart contracts were made famous by the Ethereum (ETH) network, which offers Turing-complete smart contracts that enable the development of decentralized products and services. What not everyone may be aware of, however, is that smart contracts also exist on Bitcoin (BTC).
Read on to learn about Bitcoin smart contracts and the different projects that are pushing smart contract functionalities on top of the Bitcoin network.
A smart contract is a coded agreement between two or more parties that is automatically carried out when predefined criteria are met.
For instance, a Bitcoin smart contract can state that a BTC payment should be sent from one person to another once an agreeable task has been completed.
The Bitcoin network supports various types of smart contracts via Script, the scripting language that it uses.
With Script, users are able to create different criteria on how their BTC is utilized. Additionally, scripts can also lock certain amounts of BTC to specific bitcoin transactions, where users must be able to meet those standards before they can spend the BTC locked to that script.
In over the ten plus years that Script has been used in the Bitcoin protocol, it has proven to be a useful scripting language supporting a wide range of Bitcoin smart contracts, such as the simpler pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH) to more complex ones like multi-signature scripts, pay-to-script-hash (P2SH), and time-locked transactions.
Let’s take a look at the most common types of scripts Bitcoin uses.
A P2PKH is a simple and popular script that enables users to send BTC to a bitcoin address. It’s the most basic form of making a transaction on the Bitcoin network.
A time-locked bitcoin transaction is a type of smart contract that controls
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