Ethereum has attracted significant attention in recent years thanks to the sometimes futuristic use cases its supporters describe. As a platform for smart contracts, Ethereum is frequently portrayed as a potentially transformative technology capable of reshaping many aspects of commerce and governance, including the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations.
Rootstock is another smart contract platform, but it took a different path: instead of launching its own native cryptocurrency, Rootstock has been built as a sidechain to Bitcoin. For the Rootstock team, the main focus is financial inclusion—bringing accessible financial tools to people who lack reliable access to traditional banking services.
Sergio Lerner, co-founder and chief scientist at RSK Labs (the company developing the Rootstock blockchain), discussed these goals in an interview on Epicenter Bitcoin with Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. He explained how Rootstock aims to serve users who need practical financial solutions now, rather than focusing only on speculative or highly experimental applications.
Bitcoin Is Just the First Step
RSK Labs is headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the team is deeply familiar with the financial challenges many people face across Latin America. Their goal is to give billions of individuals improved access to modern financial services by leveraging blockchain technology.
“What I see, especially in Argentina, is that we have no trust in banks, we have a history of capital controls that do not allow people to move their money, and there are numerous stories of people trying to withdraw or transfer their own funds and running into problems,” Lerner said in the Epicenter Bitcoin interview. “Bitcoin has shown many people here that there is a way to escape controls that restrict personal freedom.”
Lerner noted that, in countries like Argentina, Bitcoin has demonstrated the potential benefits of decentralized systems. Living in a nation that has experienced repeated financial crises and defaults, many people either lack bank accounts or have lost trust in banks. RSK Labs seeks to extend alternatives beyond those already familiar with cryptocurrency—bringing peer-to-peer financial services to people who might never have considered using Bitcoin or similar technologies.
Rootstock and Financial Inclusion
Lerner emphasized that the founding motivation for RSK Labs was to increase financial inclusion across Latin America. “We believe a smart contract platform can enable financial inclusion,” he explained. “It can lower transaction costs and let people act as their own bank with smart wallets.”
He repeatedly returned to this point during the interview: financial inclusion is their primary goal, and Lerner expects it to become the dominant use case for Rootstock in the near term.
RSK Labs aims to tackle concrete financial challenges affecting billions of people worldwide, not just in Latin America. “Those who will benefit most from the RSK platform are people who probably have never heard of cryptocurrency,” Lerner said, underlining the platform’s focus on practical, accessible solutions.
Although Lerner acknowledged more speculative applications—such as decentralized autonomous organizations—he maintained that expanding access to basic financial tools is the most valuable and immediate application of smart contract platforms today.
The Peer-to-Peer Financial System
In the interview, Lerner briefly mentioned the possibility of engaging financial institutions to build microlending services on Rootstock, but he did not go into extensive technical detail about the mechanisms by which the sidechain would deliver broader financial inclusion. RSK Labs co-founder and CEO Diego Gutiérrez offered additional perspective in a separate conversation with Trace Mayer on the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast.
“We can actually build a P2P financial system where different actors act as issuers, collateral providers, and fulfill parts of what today’s banking system does,” Gutiérrez said. He focused on how Rootstock could support fiat-denominated assets issued on-chain, which he considers essential for many real-world financial use cases.
Gutiérrez described the concept of a pegged asset maintained through smart contracts: cryptocurrencies would be locked as collateral in a smart contract, and in return the contract would issue fiat-denominated tokens—representing units of local currency such as US dollars or Argentine pesos. To mitigate cryptocurrency volatility, the smart contract could require collateral values that significantly exceed the issued token amounts.
While Bitcoin already offers a way to circumvent some economic restrictions in certain countries, pegged tokens could play a vital role in building a practical peer-to-peer financial system. It’s important to note that tokenized dollars are not the same as holding actual US banknotes, and past experiments with pegged tokens have sometimes failed. Only time will tell whether a robust, reliable system can be constructed on top of Rootstock that successfully addresses volatility, trust, and adoption challenges.