RSK Labs Ltd, the company behind the smart contracts platform Rootstock, has announced that it raised $1 million in a round led by Bitmain Technology, the world’s largest bitcoin hardware mining producer, Coinsilium, a leading blockchain investment firm based in London and Digital Currency Group, the prolific investor from New York.

“Our team at DCG feels that Rootstock developing is important for both the technical and business communities building on blockchain technology today, and will enable many new use cases that have not been possible to date”, said Barry Silbert, CEO of the DCG Group.

RSK Labs said that it will use the funds to further develop the first smart contracts platform secured by Bitcoin and fully compatible with Ethereum, as well as expand its current presence in Latin America to Asia, Europe and US.

In January, Coinsilium invested, and facilitated co-investment, for a total of USD$100,000 in RSK Labs. The investment of $100,000 was 28.6% of the initial seed round, representing approximately 2% of RSK.

”I am very proud that Coinsilium supports the talented Rootstock team to develop a platform enabling smart contracts secured by the Bitcoin blockchain which I see as an essential element in the transition to a world of blockchain-based solutions for enterprises and public organizations”, said Eddy Travia, CEO of Coinsilium.

Founded in 2015, RSK is the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the Bitcoin miners via merge-mining, allowing them to actively participate in the Smart Contract revolution. It claims that it can scale far beyond Bitcoin in its current state – 100 transactions per second (same level as Paypal) without sacrificing decentralization and reducing storage and bandwidth usage using probabilistic verification and fraud proofs, as well as blockchain sharding techniques.

RSK connects the two most successful blockchain platforms built to date – Bitcoin and Ethereum – to enable new smart contracting capabilities. Its founders believe that decentralized blockchains with smart contract capabilities will be the driving force behind global financial inclusion, new democratic political systems and the internet of things.

RSK private testnet will be opened by the end of April to a small number of miners, partner companies and users. The company said that in the forthcoming months, wallets, block explorers and further enhancements to the network will be implemented and a public fully functional Beta testnet is expected to be launched in September 2016.