Bitcoin [BTC] and Bitcoin Cash [BCH] get their own savings account application, the Open Savings Initiative

On 19th September, a group of developers announced that they have launched a new project called the ‘Open Savings Initiative’, a platform that acts as a time-based lock system for Bitcoin Cash [BCH] and Bitcoin Core [BTC]. The website states:

“It’s like a certificate of deposit that you can add more money to anytime, but doesn’t require a bank.”

The idea proposed by the company is to allow users to assign any time of their choice on their account so that the assets stored in it can only be accessed after that point. The Open Savings Initiative [OSI] uses the opcode ‘OP_checklocktimeverify’ to build a pay to script hash address [P2SH].

The P2SH is a standardized code that allows transactions to be sent to an address starting with ‘3’ rather than a public key, which usually starts with ‘1’. This is done to ensure the safety and security of the tokens that is held within the OSI.

Another feature of the OSI is that it has an offline version that can be used to generate addresses even when it is disconnected from the internet. The company claims that this ‘cold wallet’ method ensures more security for the assets present within the application. The developers further stated:

“We coded up this application in the hope that ALL the wallets in the Bitcoin Cash / Bitcoin Core ecosystems adopt this feature, either by leveraging our code or implementing it themselves.”

The creators of the application have claimed that the application does not store any information of the registered users. The developers have said that the user must use his/her private key to spend the ‘time locked coins’. To solve the issue of private key sharing, the developers at Open Source Initiative have come up with the novel idea of generating a new private key every time the user needs to act as the recipient.

The developers of OSI have also drawn a correlation with the ‘Vault’ feature on Coinbase, one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world, which prevents the user from conducting transfers in a specified time frame. OSI has claimed that this privacy feature is already integrated into the protocol of the application, thereby allowing users to conduct transactions blissfully without relying on third parties.

The company has also tried to incorporate the lack of an accountable custodian on the blockchain network by making sure safety is a priority. The officials at the company have said:

“Thanks to the “nlocktime” parameter and scripts such a “OP_checklocktimeverify” being introduced into Bitcoin and continued on Bitcoin Cash, there is now a straightforward way of securely locking up funds on the blockchain without a custodian, which can only be spent at a future date.”