A San Francisco based startup, Chain, is aiming to make writing smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain much easier for developers. The company has recently released its open-source compiler, which acts as a translator between the Bitcoin script and Chain’s own smart contract language, Ivy.

In a blog post, the company explained that Ivy was written to help developers to write custom bitcoin addresses which are compatible with SegWit, and which enforce arbitrary combinations of conditions which are supported by the protocol, such as hash commitments, time locks and signature checks.

Ivy was first released as a public demo at the end of 2016, and has since undergone further testing and development. Ethereum is a major cryptocurrency which makes use of smart contracts. However, while Ethereum’s smart contract functions are what differentiates it from Bitcoin, it also prevents developers from writing smart contracts using Bitcoin Script.

Chain now argues that the limitations of Bitcoin Script have made the language very difficult to write in, and that an alternative can be found in a language such as Ivy. However, at the moment Ivy is still very much a tool which is used for research and educational purposes, and as such it has never been tested on the cryptocurrency markets.