The Liquid Network is up and running.
[1]
More than a year after its conceptual introduction[2] at the Blockchain Association of Canada's Government Forum in Ottawa, Blockstream’s bitcoin scaling solution made its public debut on October 10, 2018, after going live among its partners on September 27.
Described by its creators as “an inter-exchange settlement network,” Liquid is Blockstream’s complement to Lightning. However, whereas Lightning is designed for micropayments, Blockstream’s COO Samson Mow told Bitcoin Magazine, “Liquid is designed to facilitate fast and reliable high value transfers.”
“Liquid allows parties to send funds to any destination, without the need to establish channels ahead of time. Funds in Lightning are ‘hot’ (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.”
Unlike its counterpart in Lightning, which is a secondary layer, Liquid was built as a Bitcoin sidechain[3]. 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’t provide.
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.
This design is a bit of a spin on
