Blockstream has officially launched Simplicity, a next-generation smart contracting language, on the Liquid Network, marking a major milestone in Bitcoin’s programmability and Layer 2 development.

According to a statement from the Liquid Network team, Simplicity has reached the locked-in phase and activated on July 30th. 

The milestone follows full signaling by all functionary operators over a 10,080-block window, the consensus threshold required for activation.

Simplicity introduces a formally verifiable, typed, combinator-based language designed to offer greater expressiveness and safety than Bitcoin Script. 

It is deliberately Turing incomplete, allowing only finitary functions, which makes it amenable to static analysis and formal resource bounds before execution. 

The language is specified in Coq and implemented in C and Haskell for use across the Liquid ecosystem.

“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.”

The deployment was enabled by the earlier release of Elements 23.3.0, which allowed signaling by Liquid functionaries.

That release also introduced technical upgrades such as wallet sync improvements, testnet activation parameters, dynafed compatibility, and robustness improvements through fuzz testing.

“Developers will be able to begin using Simplicity from day one,” the team stated in its announcement.

“@blksresearch will be adding new developer documentation, tutorials, and onboarding materials to help Bitcoin developers get started.”

Now live, Simplicity is expected to expand the capabilities of Bitcoin-native assets and smart contracts by enabling formally verifiable scripting and high-assurance financial applications.

The upgrade brings powerful new tools for building secure programmable vaults, decentralized exchanges, smart banks, and institutional custody solutions, all without reliance on global state or wrapped assets.

The activation represents a significant evolution for the Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain focused on confidential transactions and programmable asset issuance.

With over $3.27 billion in total value locked, Liquid is increasingly positioned to support enterprise adoption of Bitcoin infrastructure.

More information and ongoing developer resources are available at simplicity-lang.org.

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