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Smart contracts on Bitcoin

Bringing expressive smart contracts and decentralized applications to Bitcoin with a new toolset

19 July 2025 Riley Kilgore 4 mins read

Smart contracts on Bitcoin

What if you could take a smart contract, written using a modern language like Python, TypeScript, or Scala, and run it on Bitcoin without modifying Bitcoin itself?

Thanks to a novel compilation pipeline being developed at Input | Output (IO), that idea is becoming a reality. By combining a serialized smart contract format (Untyped Plutus Core – UPLC), a clever interpreter architecture (Control, Environment, Continuation (CEK) machine), and a widely supported open-source reduced instruction set architecture (RISC-V), IO…