It’s used as gas to pay for smart contract execution on the network, such as the transaction fee for trading RSK ecosystem tokens, the same way as ETH is used as gas for Ethereum.
You can use wallets and DeFi protocols in the RSK ecosystem to get RBTC and start transacting on the RSK network.
Transfer RBTC between accounts using Metamask
Using the RSK Powpeg peg-out process
The native mechanism for transferring bitcoins to RSK (“peg-in”) and vice versa (“peg-out”) is provided by the 2-Way Peg. In practice, when a user pegs-in, the user funds are locked in the Bitcoin blockchain and the same amount of BTC is unlocked in the RSK blockchain. When a user requests a peg-out the bitcoins on RSK get locked in the RSK blockchain and the same amount of BTC is unlocked in the Bitcoin blockchain. A security protocol ensures that the same bitcoins cannot be unlocked on both blockchains at the same time. This requires transaction finality, and that’s the reason the peg required hundreds of block confirmations for transactions that unlock bitcoins.
Since not every user is willing to wait for the required number of block confirmations, exchanges offer a faster mechanism of getting BTC/RBTC, while charging users with exchanges fees.
This blog post explains in detail: RSK’s Pow Peg design
Additionally, for more information, visit the Powpeg mechanism.