Original | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author: Golem ( @web3_golem )
BRC-20 token SATS has performed well recently. From the bottom on August 5, its price doubled in 10 days; on August 12, the single-day increase exceeded 24%, and its market value exceeded ORDI, the original leader of the BRC-20 sector, and entered the top 100 of the crypto market value list .
Most of the community interpreted this rise as the early realization of the good news that Fractal Bitcoin will be launched on the mainnet in September. The developer behind Fractal Bitcoin is UniSat, a Bitcoin ecosystem wallet. In fact, this is not the first time that UniSat has empowered SATS, but the effect was not good before.
Due to its huge total volume and large number of holders, SATS was once regarded as the biggest meme in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Why is UniSat so persistent in empowering SATS? Will it succeed this time? Odaily Odaily will explore these issues in this article.
The first empowerment attempt, BRC-20 swap charges SATS as a handling fee
No matter how many times the story of SATS is repeated, it can still be called a legend in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
It is the first massive Meme token to be minted in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with a total of 210 trillion, which took half a year and had 36,000 holding addresses when minting was completed. And unlike other BRC-20 tokens that were minted when the inscription craze came later, most of the minting of SATS was completed during the low period of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which also means that there is a group of loyal users of the Bitcoin ecosystem behind it.
Such a large-scale community with high ecological loyalty was naturally not ignored by UniSat, which had become the most widely used wallet in the Bitcoin ecosystem at that time. Shortly after SATS was minted, UniSat announced that it would empower SATS on the BRC-20 swap launched on the mainnet. Specifically, SATS will be charged as a handling fee in the BRC-20 swap launched on the mainnet, and a service fee of 0.3% will be charged to all users participating in the transaction, of which 1/6 (0.05%) will be collected by UniSat, and the remaining 5/6 (0.25%) will be distributed to all liquidity providers of each trading pair.
However, the first empowerment of SATS ended in failure. The BRC-20 swap module developed by UniSat was launched on the Bitcoin mainnet in November 2023, but because it adopted the "on-demand transaction" model and was not completely decentralized and permissionless, and because of disagreements with other developers on the construction of the BRC-20 ecosystem, UniSat suspended the BRC-20 swap service in April 2024 and returned all SATS collected in the form of handling fees before the suspension of the service to users in the form of airdrops.
Secondary empowerment, open indexers use SATS as incentives
In addition to charging fees, UniSat has explored other ways to empower SATS. In December 2023, UniSat announced that it would open its own indexer to run mining in January 2024, using SATS as an incentive.
This was UniSat's second attempt to empower SATS, but it also ended in failure. At that time, the BRC-20 indexers on the market were not unified, and several "big manufacturers" were running their own indexers, and UniSat was also targeted. Runestone founder Leonidas once requested UniSat to open the indexer on the X platform, and then questioned whether UniSat's delay in opening the indexer was to establish a competitive barrier.
Due to various factors, UniSat finally gave up the plan to create an independent indexer, and the second empowerment plan to use SATS as the indexer mining reward also failed.
The third empowerment plan, Fractal empowers sats, the continuation of the mainnet will
Although the first two empowerment attempts failed, UniSat did not give up and announced the third empowerment plan for SATS in July this year.
Specifically, UniSat announced that SATS will be used as a reward in Fractal Swap on Fractal Bitcoin, a Bitcoin scalability solution it developed. Fractal Swap uses a competitive Rollup mechanism, and users can earn SATS rewards by simply packaging their Rollup results into the sorter. At a time when the BRC-20 ecosystem was at a low point, UniSat 's empowerment of SATS received a warm response from the community and the market, and SATS rose by more than 30% that day .
In fact, UniSat’s empowerment of SATS on Fractal Bitcoin is not without trace.
Earlier this year, UniSat revealed its plan to use SATS as a Rollp mechanism reward on the X platform. In addition, in the official announcement of the closure of the mainnet BRC-20 swap, UniSat revealed that future airdrops on the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet will give priority to users who have previously interacted with the mainnet BRC-20 swap and deposited assets.
If UniSat’s previous closure of the BRC-20 swap on the mainnet was a helpless move due to various limitations, then the swap on Fractal Bitcoin is a continuation of the mainnet BRC-20 swap’s will, and the empowerment of SATS runs through it all.
Will this empowerment be successful?
Why is Unisat so obsessed with empowering SATS instead of other BRC 20 tokens?
Some people believe that UniSat is one of the dealers of SATS and controls a large number of chips, and this move is out of self-interest. Others believe that UniSat just saw the trend early and chose to go with the flow, just like when Meme coins such as DOGE and SHIB develop to a certain level, someone will come to do various drainage and empowerment.
Will Fractal Bitcoin's empowerment of SATS be successful this time? There is no definite answer at present. After all, the failure of the previous two empowerment plans was due to the challenges of business development itself, and Fractal Bitcoin seems to be facing the same problem. For example, what kind of cross-chain solution should be adopted between the Bitcoin mainnet and Fractal Bitcoin to achieve goals such as security and efficiency, and whether running OP_CAT can really improve the programmability of Fractal Bitcoin. The road ahead for Fractal Bitcoin is shrouded in a layer of mist.
As for SATS itself, since it was minted, it has been listed on mainstream exchanges and has gone through several Bitcoin ecological cycles. From the on-chain data, the number of SATS holding addresses is still growing, and currently the number of holding addresses has reached 49,019, which is still greater than the number of holding addresses when minting was completed.
Therefore, whether UniSat succeeds or not, and whether SATS ultimately exists as a meme coin or a utility token, may not be the most important thing. As long as the influence and topicality remain, even if one UniSat fails and falls, there will be 10,000 "UniSats" standing up again.
