{"id":21220,"date":"2018-10-10T17:44:12","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T17:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe63a00e26c3"},"modified":"2018-10-10T17:44:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T17:44:12","slug":"blockstreams-liquid-network-high-value-bitcoin-payments-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/technical\/blockstreams-liquid-network-high-value-bitcoin-payments-live","title":{"rendered":"Blockstream\u2019s Liquid Network for \u201cHigh Value\u201d Bitcoin Payments Is Live"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>
<\/figure>\n

The Liquid Network<\/a> is up and running.<\/p>\n

More than a year after its conceptual introduction<\/a> at the Blockchain Association of Canada’s Government Forum in Ottawa, Blockstream\u2019s bitcoin scaling solution made its public debut on October 10, 2018, after going live among its partners on September 27.<\/p>\n

Described by its creators as \u201can inter-exchange settlement network,\u201d Liquid is Blockstream\u2019s complement to Lightning. However, whereas Lightning is designed for micropayments, Blockstream\u2019s CSO Samson Mow told Bitcoin Magazine<\/em>, \u201cLiquid is designed to facilitate fast and reliable high value transfers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLiquid allows parties to send funds to any destination, without the need to establish channels ahead of time. Funds in Lightning are \u2018hot\u2019 (private keys are online), whereas you can store Liquid Bitcoin in both hot or cold wallets. Liquid also has the ability to have Lightning added as a second layer as well, so we view these two technologies as complementary and both important for the ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike its counterpart in Lightning, which is a secondary layer, Liquid was built as a Bitcoin sidechain<\/a>. Though not exclusive to Bitcoin, you can think of a sidechain as an extension of the Bitcoin blockchain. It allows users to swap coins from the main blockchain to its sidechain in a 1-to-1 parity, usually to tap into a feature that the main network doesn\u2019t provide.<\/p>\n

For Liquid, that feature is fast transactions with a special emphasis on trading mass sums between exchanges, financiers and market makers. As such, Mow says that exchanges and members of the Liquid network will be the main providers of liquidity, since they will be the ones keeping a balance of L-BTC which, in turn, they would allow their users to swap for.<\/p>\n

This design is a bit of a spin on the original ideation of a sidechain. The concept was initially pitched as an avenue for trustless swaps, but Liquid\u2019s iteration, which requires intermediaries to execute these swaps, may be called a federated sidechain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe members of Liquid secure the network by running functionary servers that run the Liquid blockchain as well as maintaining the two-way peg to the Bitcoin blockchain,\u201d he said. He drew the comparison that \u201cLiquid functionaries are like miners\u201d who \u201cgenerate new blocks to add to the Liquid blockchain.\u201d<\/p>\n

To leverage sidechain\u2019s features, users have to exchange mainnet BTC for Liquid Network\u2019s L-BTC using peg addresses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen someone wants to move BTC to the Liquid sidechain,\u201d Mow explained, \u201cthey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Launch: Looking Forward<\/h3>\n

Upon launch, the project has 23 partners lined up to serve as Liquid members, namely Altonomy, Atlantic Financial, Bitbank, Bitfinex, Bitmax, BitMEX, Bitso, BTCBOX, BTSE, Bull Exchange, DGroup, Coinone, Crypto Garage, GOPAX (operated by Streami), Korbit, L2B Global, OKCoin, The Rock Trading, SIX Digital Exchange, Unocoin, Xapo, XBTO and Zaif. <\/p>\n

Moving forward, Liquid hopes to expand its membership and build out its services. These services could include Issued Assets (IA), Mow explained, what amount to \u201cnative tokens within the Liquid blockchain.\u201d These IA could be security tokens, tokenized commodities\/real-world assets or even Ethereum. <\/p>\n

More than IA, Mow stated that Liquid has \u201ca lot of things coming down the pipe\u201d following its launch. These include a Liquid Testnet that is anchored to Blockstream Signet (Blockstream\u2019s testnet for Bitcoin), GreenAddress integration, a Liquid mobile wallet for mobile platforms, a user interface for Issued Assets, a Liquid Block Explorer and hardware wallet support. He expects these features to be fully functioning by 2018, with more coming in 2019. <\/p>\n

In the short term, Blockstream will focus on building out these features to ease Liquid\u2019s introduction to and use in the wider cryptocurrency community. In the long term, Mow said the the company hopes to see Bitcoin at the epicenter of a nexus of sidechains that allow for a seamless, interconnected exchange of the industry\u2019s many assets.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe end game is a platform for the trustless exchange of many assets, with Bitcoin at the center,\u201d said Mow. \u201cWe knew that having a high speed inter-exchange settlement network with privacy features would be something the market would respond well towards, but we\u2019ve seen an incredible interest from parties interested to issue tokens and assets on Liquid as well. They\u2019ve just been waiting for a secure and reliable solution to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blockstream\u2019s COO Samson Mow explains how \u201cLiquid is designed to facilitate fast and reliable high value transfers\u201d of bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies — eventually.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3468,"featured_media":21221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[287,151,1313,477,2082,396],"class_list":{"0":"post-21220","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technical","8":"tag-blockstream","9":"tag-liquid","10":"tag-payment-channels","11":"tag-payments","12":"tag-samson-mow","13":"tag-sidechains"},"author_data":{"id":3468,"name":"Aaron Van Wirdum And Colin Harper","nicename":"aaron-van-wirdum-and-colin-harper","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/88b6c65a7515990786b1c04473e15469e5b0d0fffef947ed629a60854e1cb426?s=96&d=robohash&r=g"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/blockstreams-liquid-network-for-high-value-bitcoin-payments-is-live.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3468"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}