Sergio Demian Lerner: Making Bitcoin More Programmable

While the Bitcoin ecosystem has been enjoying a fresh wave of development and engagement over the last two years, some projects have been working to expand the utility of the original blockchain for far longer. One of these is sidechain Rootstock, which launched in 2018.

Founder Sergio Demian Lerner is a Buenos Aires-based programmer known for his early research on Satoshi Nakamoto's mining activities and later for contributing to the development of Ethereum. Rootstock is now in the midst of its "BitVMX" project, designed to improve Bitcoin's programmability by harnessing Robin Linus' BitVM design that was unveiled in late 2023.

"BitVMX framework provides the foundations to run any CPU on Bitcoin," the project's accompanying whitepaper says. BitVMX's aim is to put the theory behind Linus' BitVM paradigm into practice by creating a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and enabling the further development of sidechains and layer 2s.

Rootstock plans to complete the project by late Q1 2025, according to a roadmap on its website. "The BitVMX Bridge will revolutionize the bridging technology on Rootstock, by introducing a trust-minimized Bitcoin/Rootstock bridge. This will rely on the 1-of-n honest assumption, and will not require changes to the Bitcoin consensus protocol," Rootstock explained in its roadmap.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.