MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, USA, July 31 — Blockstream, the global leader in Bitcoin-powered financial infrastructure, has announced the public launch of Simplicity, a groundbreaking smart contracting language, on the Liquid Network.
Simplicity introduces powerful, Bitcoin-native programmability, designed for a new generation of decentralized financial contracts and advanced forms of self-custody, while staying true to Bitcoin’s core values of security and auditability.
“Simplicity gives Bitcoin expressive smart contracting power, but without the security problems associated with VM-based chains,” said Dr. Adam Back, Co-Founder and CEO of Blockstream.
“It’s built from the ground up to be formally specified, secure, and efficient. With Simplicity, we’re unlocking a wide range of innovative use cases on Bitcoin.”
Unlike traditional smart contracting environments that rely on global state and complex virtual machines, Simplicity is based on Bitcoin’s stateless UTXO model.
This enables contracts to be formally verified, i.e., mathematically proven correct, before execution, making it especially well-suited to high-assurance use cases in banking and institutional finance, where reliability and transparency are essential.
A Secure Smart Contract Language Years in the Making
First envisioned in 2012 by Blockstream engineer Dr. Russell O’Connor, Simplicity is the result of years of focused development by Blockstream Research, one of the most prolific research teams in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and the driving force behind Taproot and other landmark innovations.
Simplicity is designed to balance expressiveness and security, deliberately omitting high-risk features, such as recursion, unbounded loops, and implicit global variables, that are commonly responsible for major bugs and vulnerabilities in other ecosystems.
As of today, enterprises and issuers now have access to Simplicity on the Liquid Network, a Bitcoin layer-2 solution and sidechain focusing on asset issuance with over $3.27 billion in total value locked (TVL).
Simplicity’s new smart contracting capability will enable the development of innovative financial applications and help position Bitcoin and its second-layer protocols for the next wave of tokenized finance and adoption.
From Experimentation to Execution: A New Era for Bitcoin Utility
For years, financial institutions and enterprises have poured billions into blockchain R&D, experimenting across decentralized finance, asset tokenization, and programmable custody.
Much of the potentially most meaningful enterprise and institutional adoption until now has stalled at the proof-of-concept stage, held back by the inherent complexity, fragility and implementation hurdles associated with existing smart contract platforms.
Simplicity represents a fundamental shift: bringing Bitcoin-grade contracting with improved expressivity, and the possibility of formal security guarantees.
The functionality of virtually every existing opcode proposal, every DeFi primitive in use today, and much of what exists in traditional financial markets can theoretically be built and audited in Simplicity.
Any finite computation can be expressed, empowering the community to pursue a wide spectrum of uses with high-assurance.
Potential use cases include:
- Programmable Vaults – Time-locked withdrawals, policy-enforced access, and recovery logic
- Bitcoin-Native Smart Banks – Multi-user UTXO aggregation with enforceable balance rules, Merkle tree ownership, etc.
- Decentralized Identity and Reputation – Web-of-trust systems built on signed assertions, suitable for social recovery and validation
- Auditable DEXs – Stateless, deterministic exchanges with lower attack surfaces and no global state or wrapped assets
- Institutional Custody and Access Control – Threshold signature schemes using B-N signatures, offering simpler implementation and auditing than alternatives like MuSig
- Decentralized Governance and Crowdfunding – Simplicity-encoded static voting rules, recurring payment logic, and access-controlled services, all without token dependencies
“We designed Simplicity to enable expressive Bitcoin-native applications without inheriting the complexity and fragility of other smart contract ecosystems,” said Andrew Poelstra, Director of Research at Blockstream.
“By combining formal methods with the UTXO model, we’re creating a foundation for secure, programmable finance on Bitcoin that both developers and entities such as financial institutions can depend on.”
After today’s launch, Simplicity will continue to advance at both the foundational level and through SimplicityHL, a higher-level abstraction layer.
Ongoing upgrades will make it even easier for developers to write and verify complex smart contracts directly on Bitcoin infrastructure, further expanding Simplicity’s accessibility and reach.
Simplicity’s release marks a pivotal step in Bitcoin’s evolution – expanding beyond a secure store of value to a programmable foundation for next-generation decentralized financial infrastructure. It brings Bitcoin to traditional finance on its own rails.
The future of finance runs on Bitcoin. Blockstream’s mission is to build the infrastructure that powers it.
Institutions, enterprises, and developers interested in integrating Simplicity-based smart contracts into their financial applications are invited to contact the Blockstream team at [email protected]. For additional information and developer resources, visit simplicity-lang.org.
For media enquiries, please contact Edward Moore, Blockstream Head of Public Relations ([email protected])
About Blockstream
Founded in 2014, Blockstream is a global leader in Bitcoin and blockchain infrastructure, with offices and team members distributed around the world. Serving as the technology provider for the Liquid Network, Blockstream offers a sidechain solution that enables secure, trustless Bitcoin swap settlements and robust smart contracts, empowering financial institutions to tokenize assets efficiently.
The company’s Core Lightning is a leading implementation of the open Lightning Network protocol, widely adopted for enterprise Bitcoin Lightning Network deployments. Blockstream Jade, an open-source hardware wallet, delivers advanced security for Bitcoin and Liquid assets in an easy-to-use form factor. For consumers, the Blockstream App is a highly secure and user-friendly Bitcoin wallet.
About Liquid Network
The Liquid Network is a Bitcoin sidechain and layer-2 solution that enables faster, more confidential bitcoin transactions and the issuance of digital assets, such as stablecoins, security tokens, and other financial instruments. The network is operated and managed by a globally distributed federation of more than 80 of Bitcoin’s leading enterprises. To date, Liquid has amassed more than $3.27 billion in network value and remains foundational to Bitcoin’s growth and adoption, particularly in the rapidly developing security token market.
