The RIF Blog

RIF Roadmap Recap: Getting Bitcoin To Serve Everyday People with Everyday DeFi [Part 2]

March 08, 2023

In February, Rootstock co-founder Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar (DGZ) and IOV Labs VP of product, Tim Paymans (TP) came together for a Twitter Space discussing the future of building on Bitcoin, RIF, and Rootstock.

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Bitcoin Layer 2 Explained: Unleashing the Power of Bitcoin

March 07, 2023

This article is part of IOV Labs research series that aims to help newcomers to the Web3 world navigate blockchain technology, explore its benefits, and understand its risks. Read on to learn what Layer 2 solutions are, their different types, how they solve scalability issues, and what the future holds for this technology.

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RIF Roadmap Recap: Accelerating adoption of DeFi on Bitcoin [Part One]

February 28, 2023

The RIF roadmap for 2023 was revealed on February 7th including some key milestones for the year ahead including new products, a new website and appearances at some exciting events.

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RIF Flyover is live: Introducing a new era of asset transfers between Bitcoin and Rootstock

By RIF Flyover PM, Ahmad Alkabra, February 21, 2023

The RIF Flyover protocol is now live — delivering a fast, secure, and fully decentralized pathway for Bitcoin users to enter the Rootstock ecosystem (and vice versa).

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Top 10 DeFi Applications and Use Cases In 2023

By Alamira Jouman Hajjar, Research & Editorial Manager, IOV Labs February 16, 2023

This article is part of IOV Labs research series that aims to help newcomers to the Web3 world navigate DeFi, explore its benefits, and understand its risks. Read on to learn how individuals and businesses are currently using DeFi, and what the future holds.

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Everyday DefI: The next phase of crypto adoption

By Alamira Jouman Hajjar, Research & Editorial Manager, IOV Labs February 10, 2023

The digital world is on the cusp of a revolution with the advent of Decentralized Finance, web3, and crypto-based economies.

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DeFi Decoded: A Beginner's Guide to Decentralized Finance in 2023

By Alamira Jouman Hajjar, Research & Editorial Manager, IOV Labs February 07, 2023

The traditional financial and banking services market, also known as centralized finance (CeFi), is one of the largest global industries in the world with a market size of ±$25B that is expected to reach ±$37B in 2025.

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Multisig - the RSK way

By Sr. Software Engineer Antonio Morrone July 23, 2021

What does multisig mean?
The term "multisig" stands for "multi-signature" and it's used to describe accounts associated with more than one private key. The account is created with a list of owners and a policy `m-out-of-n` when transactions are approved by at least m owners, they can be executed.

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RIF Enveloping Webinar: Key Takeaways

Speakers: Diego Masini, IOVLabs Head of Research and Innovation | Raul Laprida, IOVLabs Senior Researcher May 12, 2021

The Research and Innovation team led by Diego Masini held a webinar on 26th April 2021 to introduce the RIF Enveloping Project to the RSK community.
The RIF Enveloping team comprises of: Diego Masini, Raul Laprida, Julian Len

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RIF Community Benefits: AMA with IOVLabs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar Transcript

May 10, 2021

On May 4th, RIF hosted an AMA with IOVLabs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar on its community Telegram channel in the first instalment of the RIF Community Benefits Campaign.
You can join the RIF Community Telegram channel here: https://t.me/rif_os_community

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RSK x Bihu AMA Transcript: Bitcoin Ecosystem DeFi Services and RIF Name Service (RNS)

April 30, 2021

The RSK x Bihu AMA took place on April 22nd with the Chinese blockchain community. Below is the transcript of the event which focused on RIF’s Bitcoin DeFi platform RIF on Chain, deployed by Money on Chain, as well as RIF’s human readable blockchain domain service RNS.

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RIF Pinning: A Decentralized Storage Economy

By Brendan Graetz, Head of Developer Experience at IOV Labs 20 April, 2021

The Decentralized Storage Marketplace is now available from RIF!
marketplace.rifos.org/storage

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RIF Expert Panel: Blockchain Wallets

26 March, 2021

RIF recently hosted an expert panel discussion on Blockchain Wallets. Below is the transcript of the event.

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RIF Expert Panel: Blockchain For Enterprise

11 February, 2021

RIF recently hosted an expert panel discussion on the topic Blockchain for Enterprise. Below is the transcript of the event.

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RIF Expert Panel: Achieving Blockchain Interoperability

18 December, 2020

RIF recently hosted an expert panel discussion on the topic Achieving Blockchain Interoperability. Below is the transcript of the event.

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RIF’s Self Sovereign Identity Developer Library and Repos have been released!

by RIF Identity PO Milton Berman December 8th, 2020

We are pleased to announce the official release of RIF Identity’s Self Sovereign Identity solution! Developers can now access RIF Identity’s developer library and repos to integrate our Self Sovereign Identity solution into their projects.

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RIF Expert Panel Transcript: Open Finance vs. DeFi

12 November, 2020

RIF recently hosted an expert panel discussion on the topic Open Finance vs. DeFi. Below is the transcript of the event, you can find the video at youtube.com/rsksmart.

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RIF Expert Panel Transcript: Understanding Self Sovereign Identity

15 October, 2020

RIF recently hosted an expert panel discussion on the topic Understanding Self Sovereign Identity. Below is the transcript of the event.

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RNS - Buying and Selling Domains

By Julian Rodriguez - RIF Marketplace PO September 24, 2020

We are pleased to announce that you can now Buy and Sell RNS Domains in an easy and decentralized way through the RIF Marketplace. You can access this functionality on the RSK Mainnet at: https://marketplace.rifos.org

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Chainlink integrated as part of the RIF Gateways ecosystem on RSK

31 August, 2020

IOV Labs has integrated Chainlink Oracles into the RSK smart contracts platform as part of its RIF Gateways service. This provides developers access to oracle infrastructure for connecting their smart contract applications to resources outside the RSK platform (off-chain).

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RIF Expert Panel: The State of Decentralized Storage

31 August, 2020

RIF recently hosted a panel discussion on the topic The state of Decentralized Storage. Speakers include Vojtěch Šimetka, RIF Storage PO; David Vorick, CEO Sia; Daniel Nagy, Developer Ethereum Swarm; Saswata Basu, CEO 0Chain. Hosted by IOVLab’s developer Rinke Hendriksen.

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RIF Expert Panel Transcript: What is Defi and why is it important?

3 August, 2020

RIF recently hosted a panel discussion on the topic What is Defi and why is it important? Speakers include: Alejandro Narancio, PO RIF Payments; Manuel Ferrari, Co-Founder of Money on Chain; Brian Prillick, Founder and Managing Director CTF Capital; Mariano Di Pietrantonio, Senior Marketing Manager Maker DAO Latin America and Spain.

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RIF Expert Panel Transcript: What are oracles and why do we need them?

20 July, 2020

On July 6th RIF hosted an expert panel discussion on the topic of oracles: what are they and why do we need them?

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On the path to DSE: The RIF Marketplace

By Julian Rodriguez - RIF Marketplace PO June 30, 2020

RIF Marketplace provides a one-stop-shop for a wide variety of decentralized services, allowing providers and consumers to meet in a secure and efficient way. The main goal is to enable the fast and efficient creation of decentralized sharing economies (DSE) on top of RSK and RIF, providing the required tools to bring all parties together.

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RIF Identity’s Commitment to Enable Self Sovereign Identity

By RIF Identity PO Milton Berman June 5, 2020

Maintaining digital privacy is increasingly challenging in the modern world where often you and your data are the product on so-called free internet services. In our lifetime we have seen private and public surveillance increase under the guise of terrorist surveillance, public safety, and most recently, a global pandemic.

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Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar AMA Responses

May 28, 2020

On April 23 2020, IOVlabs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar took part in an AMA taking questions from the community in an open forum. You can read the transcript of the event below, where Diego covers topics of IOVlabs efforts in the wake of Covid-19, the value of the RIF token and RIF on Chain, as well as Taringa!’s place in the ecosystem.

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RIF Publish - UX Focused Censorship Resistant Publishing

By Nik Page - UX Consultant May 20, 2020

There is a crisis in the dissemination of truth. As dramatic as that sounds it’s probably an understatement. High-quality journalism, once the source of information accepted as an almost sacred font of this truth, is under attack from multiple angles ranging from customized search results in the big search engines to revenues based click-through advertising to questionable media to outright censorship and bot delivered propaganda. Sadly this is a shortlist of issues.

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RIF Marketplace - The Case for Decentralization

By Julian Rodriguez - RIF Marketplace PO May 12, 2020

Marketplaces are, without any doubt, at the heart of the Sharing Economy. We have all witnessed and probably experienced to some extent, the rise and growth of numerous digital platforms that allowed us to expand our horizons and connect with others to exchange goods or services, at any time of the day, from anywhere in the world.

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RIF on Chain Launch

By Santiago de Lavallaz April 21, 2020

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Rif on Chain DeFi platform (ROC), the first RIF DeFi ecosystem built and deployed by Money on Chain (MOC) on top of the RSK blockchain network.

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RIF Gateways: Thinking Outside the Blockchain

By Julian Rodriguez - Gateways PO April 17, 2020

At this point in time, it is clear that blockchain technology has several benefits over traditional centralized solutions, and has the potential to drastically disrupt a wide range of industries, probably changing the shape of the world as we know it today. Blockchain and smart contracts provide a new level of trust, eliminating the need for intermediaries and generating a much more secure and transparent system overall.

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Making blockchain easy for developers: RNS JS library

By Javi Esses - RIF Developer April 14, 2020

RIF Name Service (RNS) is a decentralized service that allows users to have a human-readable domain in any blockchain. It can be used to identify anything in the blockchain simply by associating a name to an address; (learn how to register a domain in this article). It sounds good, but we all know that it can be pretty difficult to interact directly with smart contracts if you are not a blockchain developer.

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How to launch a serverless website using RIF Storage

By Rinke Hendriksen - Swarm Product Owner April 10, 2020

RIF Storage was set out to create the base-layer of a truly decentralized internet. Previously we have spoken about the partnership between RIF Storage and Swarm in regards to the high-level workings of the protocol, the improvements with respect to incentivization of the protocol, and the launch of our incentivized testnet.

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RNS User Interface Update

By Ilan Olkies - RNS Product Owner April 8, 2020

RIF Name Service (RNS) is a decentralized service that allows users to have a readable domain in any blockchain. In other words, RNS is the phonebook of the blockchain. Humans access information online through domain names, like alice.rsk or bob.rsk. Wallets interact through the blockchain protocol using addresses.

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RIF Technology Update and 2020 Roadmap

April 6, 2020

Despite these tough times, the RIF team continues working remotely from more than 7 countries around the world with the goal of helping billions of people to benefit from blockchain technology and a fully decentralized internet.

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RIF Platform Evolution: 2019 Achievements & Milestones

By Gabriel Kurman – RIF Strategist January 21, 2020

Since the birth of RSK in 2015, the potential positive social impact of Bitcoin and blockchain technology was the driving force of our efforts and sense of purpose. Today, after 5 years of hard work and with the incredible support from the Bitcoin miners and the global community, RSK has become the most secure smart contract platform in the world, with more than 50% of total Bitcoin hashing power (ATH of 66%), achieved through merged mining.

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RIF Storage testnet launch

January 7, 2020

Ever since the launch of the RIF Storage team, we have been working hard to make the vision of a decentralized internet a reality. During laBITconf, IOV-labs officially launched the RIF-Storage testnet; an important milestone towards a decentralized internet!
In this blog post, we give you some background to how we achieved this milestone; in the end, we explain to you how to connect and download and AWESOME picture from RIF Storage!

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DeFi on Bitcoin & RIF Lumino Payments: The Next Revolution on Finance

December 20, 2019

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is the movement that leverages decentralized networks to transform old financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run without intermediaries.

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RIF Storage and Swarm’s SWAP SWIPs

September 11, 2019

The RIF Storage team has been busy SWIPping, and if you have no idea what that means and you are curious to find out: please read along!

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RIF OS Vision & Roadmap

July 4, 2019

On this post, RIF Strategist Gabriel Kurman, explains the RIF OS Vision & Roadmap.

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RIF Storage: The First Chunks

July 1, 2019

On this blogpost, RIF Storage Team Product Owner, Vojtech Simetka & Smart Contract Developer, Rinke Hendriksen, analyze RIF Storage partnership with Swarm and the next steps.

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RIF Name Services – First DNS to Manage Domains from Any Blockchain

June 13, 2019

The main objective of RIF services is to facilitate the use of Blockchain technology by making it available for everyone as simple as possible. One of the main challenges when dealing with crypto-assets, is interaction with multiple addresses that are difficult to manage and remember.

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AMA Session with Gabriel Kurman

May 29, 2019

On this post, you can find the May 2019 AMA answers from RIF Strategist, Gabriel Kurman.

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Scalability: What is RIF Lumino Payments Trying to Achieve?

May 28, 2019

On this post, we briefly analyze RIF Lumino Payment´s approach to scalability.

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RIF Storage: A Decentralized Storage Solution

May 3, 2019

On this post, RIF Storage Team Product Owner, Vojtech Simetka analyzes the purpose of RIF Storage.

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RIF Name Service (RNS) & MyCrypto: RNS Manager 1.0.2 now supports MyCrypto

May 1, 2019

At IOVLabs, we are happy to announce that the new version of RNS Manager allows users to connect with MyCrypto for any operation such us registering and managing names.

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RIF Token Sale

January 6, 2019

This post is to provide some clarity on certain aspects of the RIF Token issuance process that, although specified in the Whitepaper, appear to be causing some confusion in the community.

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The Rationale for More Secure Smart Contracts

December 26, 2018

When it comes to the future of business, there are few innovations that have captured the imagination more than the concept of smart contracts. Despite the misnomer -- the degree to which they are “smart” or even “contracts” is still a matter of intense debate -- businesses understand the need for autonomous processes that are unstoppable and always-on. At least so far as it doesn’t destroy user experience, the answer to “How much security do we need?” is almost always “More.” This is why it makes sense to look at the best way to provide secure smart contracts. Bitcoin has this answer.

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RIF Architecture – Service Protocols

December 13, 2018

Developers face many challenges when designing and implementing decentralized Blockchain applications. For example, many dApps contracts require reliable access to external data, such as price feeds. They also require decentralized storage for storing off-chain files to reduce on-chain storage cost. An autonomous dApp might store off-chain web pages and javascript code, and verify the authenticity of those files on-chain.

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What’s In a Name?

December 3, 2018

The blockchain ecosystem suffers from an adoption-curve crisis. At a certain point -- much like we saw in the history of the Internet itself -- this technology must make itself relevant to the most people possible on a larger scale. What we have all gained in security via the blockchain revolution, we have yet to achieve in terms of user experience. Nearly a decade since the Nakamoto whitepaper, we are long past the time when we need to start thinking about the latter seriously, lest all of this effort merely benefit a handful of relatively well-to-do enthusiasts who too often only make hand-waving promises of greater inclusion.

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The RIF Mission – Fostering Digital Inclusion

November 27, 2018

According to The World Bank’s Global Findex report “1.7 billion adults remain unbanked, yet two-thirds of them own a mobile phone that could help them access financial services.” The term “bank” as a metaphor for “financial services” is a persistent one. But, just as many emerging countries leapfrogged over landline telephones to mobiles for voice communication, so too may these “unbanked” people very easily glide past traditional institutions on their way toward modern, more personal, distributed financial service delivery models.

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RIF Labs Launches RIF OS

November 18, 2018

RIF Labs Launches RIF OS on top of the Bitcoin based RSK Network to bring the Internet of Value one step closer to realization. There are more than three billion people in the world with little or no access to the basic financial services required to participate and thrive in our society. Bitcoin was created to provide individuals with economic freedom, and, in our vision, to set the foundation for the construction of a new Internet for the transfer of value.

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