[ANN] [TN] Echo : The Sidechain bringing Decentralized Applications to Bitcoin

Welcome to a New Era

As Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem continue to mature, it’s becoming increasingly clear that public blockchains will replace today’s financial infrastructure with networks that are more open, programmatic, and sovereign. While Bitcoin has begun to reach scale as a global store of value, its use is still often siloed in centralized services that expose users to the risk of a trusted third party, like exchanges and custodians. To minimize this risk, developers and entrepreneurs have long sought to use Bitcoin in more expressive smart contracts that would enable users to access a variety of financial services, while remaining in control of their value at all times. Innovation has been strong to date, but still lags the true potential of Bitcoin-backed financial applications. That’s why we’re building Echo: a network for creating sovereign, decentralized applications that work with Bitcoin. With Echo, developers will be able to build a wide range of applications that integrate Bitcoin, helping usher in a new era of usability for the world’s first cryptocurrency.

Echo's mission is to enable a new, sovereign digital economy built with Bitcoin. We're building the infrastructure for an economic system that empowers all with the opportunity to interact with freedom and independence, creating abundant innovation, prosperity, and growth.

What is Echo?

Echo is a generalized smart contract protocol that enables efficient decentralized computing. It provides the infrastructure and developer tooling necessary to build and deploy scalable, high-performing decentralized applications.

Echo includes several main modules:

PoWR Consensus

Fast, final and scalable BFT consensus using Proof of Weighted Randomness (PoWR) also known as EchoRand. EchoRand uses a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to randomly select a pool of block producers and block verifiers proportionally to their stake to validate each new set of transactions.

x64 Virtual Machine & EVM

Integrated virtual machines allow you to use smart contracts on the Echo network. Smart contracts can be written both in Solidity and in more familiar and convenient languages, such as C, C++, Rust, Go and many more.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Sidechains

The sidechain mechanism integrated into the protocol allows you to access BTC and ETH within the Echo network, using built-in two-way pegging, thus enabling their direct use in Echo smart contracts and enabling the development of new DeFi technologies and products.

Links to Begin

Our Site: https://echo.org/
Our Documentations: https://docs.echo.org/
Explorer: https://explorer.echo.org
Github: https://github.com/echoprotocol

Join the Discussion

Discord: https://discord.gg/UaPEbYk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ECH0Net