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Building on Bitcoin with Rootstock I Ezequiel Rodriguez

ETHGlobalSun, Nov 9, 2025, 12:00 AM

Ezequiel Rodríguez, Head of DeFi at Rootstock Labs, presents Rootstock (RSK) as the first and longest-running Bitcoin sidechain, secured through merged mining and fully EVM-compatible, bridging Bitcoin’s security and store-of-value with Ethereum’s programmability. Rootstock uses a 2-way peg between BTC and RBTC (1:1), enabling users to pay gas in Bitcoin and deploy Ethereum smart contracts—including ERC-20, 721, and 1155 tokens—on a faster and cheaper chain (24-second block time, ~$0.20 fees). Upcoming upgrades like microblocks will reduce confirmation time to 5 seconds. Rodríguez highlights Rootstock’s $400M TVL, 100% uptime since 2018, and over 225,000 monthly transactions secured by 80% of Bitcoin’s hash rate, showcasing the network’s maturity and resilience. He introduces Rootstock’s Hackathon Tracks—Everyday DeFi (yield, lending, liquidity), Freestyle (AI, cross-chain, governance), and RIF Economy (staking, payments, Telegram mini-apps)—along with its Activator Program, rewarding developers and educators up to $1,000 for contributions. Tools like Replit starter kits, the Rootstock CLI, MCP integrations, and the new NPM package simplify development directly from IDEs. The Attestation Service supports both on-chain and off-chain verifications for identity, reputation, and proof-of-funds use cases. Builders can access the developer portal (dev.rootstock.io) and participate in the “RIF Me Up” campaign for community rewards. Rootstock’s ecosystem demonstrates a maturing vision: unlocking DeFi and smart contracts secured by Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. 00:02 – Introduction and session overview 00:35 – What is Rootstock: the first Bitcoin sidechain 01:07 – Combining Bitcoin security with Ethereum programmability 01:34 – Merged mining, 2-way peg, and open-source structure 02:24 – RBTC as native token, EVM and token standard compatibility 02:52 – Transaction speed, costs, and upcoming microblocks 03:44 – Network stats: TVL, uptime, wallets, hash rate, and volume 04:35 – Activator Program and community engagement 05:22 – Roles: Builders and Backers, collective contribution 05:50 – DApp Protocol example (bridging and swapping) 06:17 – Hackathon tracks: DeFi, Freestyle, and RIF Economy 07:08 – Rootstock Attestation Service: on/off-chain identity 08:15 – Developer tools: Replit starter kits, CLI, Scaffold 09:19 – Developer portal and resources 10:03 – MCP integration, CLI, and NPM package for IDEs 10:33 – Community campaigns: “RIF Me Up” rewards 10:58 – Closing remarks and contact details _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *ETHGlobal New Delhi* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New Delhi, a 3-day hackathon held September 19-21 at the India International Convention & Expo Centre, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New Delhi 2025 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7zCFW3hBqatZ18rQaYeEJL _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Rootstock* X: https://x.com/rootstock_io ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Transcript

[Music] Hi everyone, welcome to another session on it global. Uh today we are in New Delhi. So let me introduce myself. My name is Eil Rodriguez. I'm the head of Deex in Rustoabs.

Uh here you have my contact information if you want to reach me out. Uh also you can uh reach rooto on the official uh discord channel. So uh if you still don't know what is rooto let me say that it's the first and longest uh bitcoin side chain. Uh it's secured by bitcoin proof of work through merge mining. We are fully compatible.

So this means that you can deploy all your ethereum smart contracts uh with us. uh which uh this will enable defi bitcoin uh hosting a variety of uh applications, protocols and other services. So if you ask me what is which is the h best benefit uh that you can get from rooto is that it is designed to combine the best world of bitcoin and ethereum. So you will have from Ethereum the security and store of value and from Ethereum you will get the compatibility and programmability. So uh let's get some insights on uh what makes rooto so outstanding.

So first as I mentioned before the security with immerse mining uh also we have the two-way proof of work uh secure peg which means that one bitcoin equals one uh rbtc which is our native token. Uh everything is open source so you can check everything on GitHub and on our GitHub repositories on slash arsmart or slash rooto uh also as a store of value as I mentioned before also is the RBTC which is pay one to one with bitcoin and it's our native token so you will pay h gas fees with rbtc compatibility. We are fully VM compatible. So, not only you can deploy your smart contract, but we also support all the token standards like ERC20, 1155, uh 721 and so on. And the last one, scalability.

H if you want to do a transaction on Bitcoin, it will take up to 10 minutes for the block to be merged. With rootock in average you have 24 seconds. Uh also the transaction fee is much much lower as you can see it's around 20 cents. Uh and uh as an update we are uh progressing on the microp pro which will allow us to increase the block time to only 5 seconds. So that will be massive when once it's released.

Okay. uh from a dep point of view why you want to be on rooto this is our actually hard metrics that you can check we have 400 million in tbl we have 100% uptime in mainet since January 2018 uh we have more than 128 25,000 wallets on rooftock uh on average 80% of the bitcoin merge mining hash rate it's now 24 seconds uh block time, 225,000 transactions each month and almost 300 bitcoins locked on the pope. The pope if you want also to check it's on the pope.tock.io.

Uh this is a slide which for space constraints I can show you all the partners that we have on board but as you can see it's full uh and also uh from the dev's perspective uh we have all the main platforms like alchemy webspot gelato and tenderly activator this is a contribution program uh that actually is getting a lot lot of engagement from the community. Uh actually lot of people around the the venue come to the booth to uh say hi in person. Uh this is we are going to release uh next Tuesday the version three of the program uh which will have now a proper platform online. Uh so check the land the landing page on rooto.ioactivator /activator uh and the program consists on basically two type of uh contribution content code sorry and educational content uh and both are up to a thousand uh dollars in rewards collective if you want to be part of the community you can be and you're a developer you can be a builder uh this is when you get actual uh support from the community with actual funding.

Uh and if you are not a developer but you also want to participate on rooto you can be a backer. So you will take your rift tokens and then erh support or back a builder as we call it uh to get some rewards. One of our partners that actually uh came from the collective is DAP protocol which is a bridging uh crosschain solution uh which also does swapping and lending uh and as you can see on the slide 60% of the rewards was already um distributed uh through the through the collective. Uh if you want to check them out, it's at dab.io.

Okay. Erh, regarding the tracks today on the on the hackathon, we have a three tracks. One is the everyday defy track which is for yield strategies, lending, bolts and liquidity pools. Uh then uh if you have another innov innovative idea it can be with a freestyle track most of you use it for the AI content AI AI prediction markets and so on uh also for crosschain and governance is more than it fits this uh track and the last track is the reef economy uh which is everything related with our uh utility token risk. Uh so again if you want to do a staking or payments or telegram mini apps also uh apply for this track.

A couple of months ago uh on another session uh in Bangkok we released the announcements of the rooftop at the station service. Uh so a couple of week ago we released the offchain at the station. uh we already have the onchain but now also you can do offchain. If you still don't know what is uh the the the attestation service in general is basically to erh several use cases. For example, if you want to have a virtual identity, you can use it to attest who you are or who you said you are.

Erh same happen with reputation systems and for example for proof of funds, right? Uh so this for example the proof of funds it's able to avoid using an escro because you are attesting that you have actually the funds replete. We have a official account through stock debx uh with a lot of uh starter kits and projects already there. They are all fork and play projects. So you can actually uh create your account if you don't know about replet fork the project and just uh press the play button and you will just uh run everything on the cloud.

You don't need to install anything on your laptop. It's all all on the cloud. uh regarding the project that we already have there it's the CLI and AI agent lot of starter kits with wagmi reion and privy integrations hard also foundry that I missed here uh and our last release was the rooto scaffold so if you all know about ethereum scaffold project it's kind of the same actually scaffold came from the hackivator program it's one of our community contribution Uh so if you want to check it out it's really good and especially for a hackathon. Okay. Okay.

If you have any technical question or you want to check on guidelines on how to do things check the rooto developer portal. It's on dev.rustto.io. uh on the for developers especially resources and the tool tabs are the main one to check on all the material that you will ask also you will have a lot of context regarding on rooto and how it works the pope and and other stuff we just released also a couple of weeks ago the rootok mcp uh so if you want to erh we take advantage of the rooto cla that mentioned that it's also on the on replet.

Um it allows you to do whatever you want to do on crypto leveraging on the CLI uh like deploying a smart contract, creating a wallet, doing transfers and a lot of uh more of use cases uh directly from the prompt. So you can MCP right now it's the trending topic. So we are on it, we release it and uh we expect feedback from you guys if you are using it. Uh and not only that from this we also because we are using inside the company we released the npm package so you can integrate directly on your cursor ID and use it directly on your ID. So if you are working on a project you can check for example uh the status of a transaction deploy your uh contracts from the context of the project.

So it's all in there and it's like following two three steps and it's done. Okay. Okay. Uh as you saw on the booth we have the rift me up campaign. So uh sharing on uh your social networks uh regarding um reef staking and other activities uh you will get rewarded.

Uh so please check it out. [Music]

Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.