Ethereum co-founder Dr Gavin Wood and company release Parity Bitcoin

Parity Technologies, led by Ethereum co-founder Dr Gavin Wood, has released the Parity Bitcoin technology stack and new implementation of the Bitcoin protocol written in Rust, a high performance and reliable alternative to existing Bitcoin software.

Parity (formerly Ethcore) is hard at work developing the Polkadot protocol, which promises to deliver interoperability between Ethereum and other blockchains, including private implementations. The team has also released many key protocol upgrades including the revolutionary "Warp sync" and hardened Ethereum software robust enough to withstand the last year's various attacks on the blockchain.

Parity Bitcoin is fully compliant with the legacy Bitcoin reference implementation and built from the ground up to the highest standards of software development, said a statement. The software is released under the popular free software licence GNU GPL allowing other projects to fork and build on top of the codebase.

Wood, founder of Parity Technologies, reckons that Rust's clean code, performance and reliability will make Parity Bitcoin the go-to platform for developers. "We're really glad to hand this to the Bitcoin developer community and hope the fresh start can form a springboard for innovation. We'd love to work with other Bitcoin protocol folk to get key improvements like Schnorr signature schemes widely adopted," he said.

The development was initially sponsored by leading Bitcoin mining pools F2Pool, Bixin (formerly HAOBTC) and Bitmain, which commented: "Parity's implementation is an excellent addition to a growing number of Bitcoin implementations. The diversity and choice better represent the different participants in the eco-system, allowing everyone to adopt a solution that works for them."

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, founder of Zcash, also commented on the release: "Zcash is based on Bitcoin and we've started using Rust, so we're delighted to see a full Bitcoin implementation in Rust from a good team. This kind of innovation helps move the whole ecosystem forward'" he said.

Parity's BTC client can be downloaded on Github.