Company Description: Rootstock

Rootstock (RSK) is an EVM compatible sidechain designed to be fully compatible with the Bitcoin blockchain. The bridge was initially launched in Dec 2020 with a federated model, it later upgraded to a system where 9 organizations support the Powpeg bridge but they have no direct control of Bitcoin multig private keys. There are roughly 3500 RBTC in circulation as of April 2023. As far as I can tell, peg-outs are not yet possible.

Product Review: Testing the rBTC Bridge

• Deck with screenshots
• Overall Impressions:
  • UX is simplistic and missing a lot of information that would be helpful to the user. For example
    • tell people what the minimum spend is upfront
    • tell people to save the TX ID (even though the search bar didn’t work)
  • The tooltip in the app says peg-outs are “coming soon” which is misleading, based on what I could tell from the docs, peg-outs sometimes work and sometimes don’t work.
  • 16 hours is way too long to peg-in. Compared to WBTC, which took me less than 5 mins to peg in and peg out.

Takeaways:

• With over two years in the wild, this app does not seem to have reached product market fit. Compared to Avalanche, which launched BTC.b in June 2022 and has 1.5x circulating supply as of April 2023 (5500 vs 3500 roughly).