Answer Guy on Nostr: Blockstream is a company which has focused on building the Bitcoin ecosystem through ...

Blockstream is a company which has focused on building the Bitcoin ecosystem through a number of projects, products, and services including the hardware and software for the Liquid™ side chain (operated by an independent federation of exchanges and other companies), the Green™ mobile and desktop software wallets, Jade™ hardware wallet, Core Lightning implementation of the ⚡️Lightning Network protocols, and their tokenized mining financial instrument, the Blockstream Mining Notes (BMN).

That's already a bit of a run-on sentence. Each of those products and services requires whole paragraphs of explanation. Most of their software is free and open source.

Liquid is at the nexus of their offerings. It's a side chain operating on L-BTC tokens with are cryptographically pegged, 1:1 to ₿ through an 11/15 multi-signature contract on the main Bitcoin blockchain, which enables secure processing of transactions on the side chain without counter party slippage.

The side chain supports a number of asset types and tokens (including the BMN, and USDt (Tether) and enables trustless issuance of new tokens along with some enhanced script (smart contract) features (especially atomic swaps which facilitate various peer-to-peer transactions without trusted intermediaries). It also offers transaction confidentiality (transaction amounts are blinded so only participants, and third parties granted unblinding keys, can see how much of a given UTXO was in each output (spent vs. returned as change, for example).

Blockstream has funded research and Code contributions to Bitcoin core since its inception (some founders were already core contributors). They provided significant support and code for SegWit (segregated witness) and taproot (Schnorr signature aggregation) as well as having supported interns who contributed PSBT (a standard for partially signed Bitcoin transactions), miniscript (a higher level set of scripting libraries which support composition of Bitcoin script fragments and "compiles" into the standard Bitcoin script transaction processing language) as well as the output descriptors support in core (enhanced enumeration of payment addresses from a given seed/secret, including support for enumeration/generation of certain types of multisig addresses).

They also contributed a number of optimizations to the core software and were the primary developers of libsecp (the cryptographic libraries upon which Bitcoin and almost all other cryptocurrencies depend).

Their Esplora is the open source codebase underlying the Blockstream Explorer web service (for viewing parsed details of any block or transaction on Bitcoin or Liquid blockchains). Esplora can be run entirely on your own systems (along with Bitcoin and optionally Liquid full node software) to allow for completely private search and analysis of this blockchain data (so you don't have to trust Blockstream, Inc. to refrain from tracking your browsing.

They also maintain an online store which accepts ₿ (on chain or over the ⚡️network) and L-BTC. It was the first online shop accepting Lightning payments (under #reckless hash tag).

Another of their research projects, reportedly nearing fruition, is Simplicity™ which is an enhanced script engine rigorously built using formal verification tooling and methods. That's slated to be deployed to the Liquid side chain first (possibly this year) and will also be available for adoption by Bitcoin core — if a critical mass of support emerges from the broader Bitcoin community.


Yes. I work for them (in IT/Ops). No. I don't speak on their behalf.

You will likely see a surfeit of FUD,🔥 flames, and mudslinging about Blockstream.

Caveat lector (let the reader beware).