RSK Labs has announced the release of RSK Turmeric, which is the beginning of the RSK Testnet Network. It is being used by the partners of RSK, in order to test their distributed applications and tools.

The co-founder & investor relations at RSK Labs and CEO of Koinbanx, Gabriel Kurman, stated that RSK virtual machine can perform transactions six times faster than its competing machine, Ethereum. This network is the first public release incorporating innovative features, focusing RSK’s components, including a Turing complete smart contracts virtual machine, a bridge enabling transfers to and from the bitcoin network, set of plug-ins to allow bitcoin miners to merge mine both blockchains at the same time, among others.

“Turmeric is backed by around 5 Petahashes from Bitcoin miners that are running the merge-mining plugins that were developed for CKPool, Eloipool, and Stratum-mining software pools,” the press release stated during Turmeric’s launch. “The RSK virtual machine is compatible with the Solidity compiler, meaning that any Ethereum developer can smoothly port his/her applications to RSK.”

Turmeric plans to facilitate the creation of smart contract solutions for IoT, financial inclusion and in pure democracy applications . Kurman also stated that it will be used for crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and microfinancing solutions as well.