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ToggleWhat is Fractal Bitcoin?
Fractal Bitcoin, led by Bitcoin wallet provider UniSat and Web3 investment company Block Space Force, announced that its first block was mined on September 9, marking the official launch of the mainnet of this Bitcoin side chain. The project aims to enhance the scalability of Bitcoin by using Bitcoin Core code, which is different from other Bitcoin scaling solutions.
Lorenzo, head of UniSat and core contributor to Fractal, said:
“The launch of Fractal on mainnet is a pivotal moment for the Bitcoin ecosystem. It provides developers with a powerful platform to experiment, innovate, and build native solutions on Bitcoin without relying on external Architecture.
Fractal says it achieves scalability through a technology called "recursive layering," which allows the creation of multiple independent layers on top of Bitcoin, each capable of increasing Bitcoin's Layer 1 throughput. Improved by 20 times. Officials stated that transactions executed on Bitcoin Layer 1 will take approximately 10 minutes to confirm, while Fractal’s block confirmation time will be less than 30 seconds.
Since launching its testnet in July, Fractal has attracted 1.5 million unique addresses and processed 13.6 million transactions. According to data from UniSat, the network's current computing power reaches 11.23 exahash/s, accounting for approximately 1.9% of Bitcoin's total computing power.
However, after the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet was launched, there were many doubts in the community.
Fractal premine controversy
Fractal’s native token FB was also launched simultaneously on September 9, but half of the total tokens have been pre-mined, of which 15% are allocated to core contributors, 15% to the ecosystem treasury, 10% to community subsidies, 5 % to advisors and 5% to pre-sale investors. The remaining 50% of tokens will be used as rewards for proof-of-work miners.
Fractal uses a hybrid merged mining mechanism called Cadence Mining. One out of every three Fractal blocks will be mined merged with the Bitcoin mainnet, and the remaining two blocks will be mined natively. Merge-mined blocks allow Bitcoin miners to participate in Fractal's security maintenance.
The issuance of tokens is carried out according to the two-year halving cycle. In the first two years, 52.5 million tokens will be released, and each block will reward 25 FB tokens. Fractal also plans to introduce a tokenized governance mechanism based on FB in the future.
However, Fractal has been criticized for its premine practices. Mempool founder mononaut pointed out that pre-mined tokens can be used immediately, which makes control of the token supply excessively concentrated in the hands of insiders. mononaut tweeted:
“If everything goes according to plan, it will take miners two years (i.e. the entire Fractal halving cycle) to mine half of the tokens that the founders allocated to themselves on day one.”
Additionally, mononaut described Fractal as a “rushed copy” of the Bitcoin core v24.0.1 codebase, with only a few consensus modifications and “code copied from Namecoin and Bitcoin Cash.” "In my opinion, this is just a bad fork coin," he said.
Introducing OP_CAT to implement smart contracts
On the other hand, Fractal also introduced support for OP_CAT, an opcode disabled by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2010 that enables smart contract functionality on Bitcoin.
Although Satoshi Nakamoto had worried that this opcode might become one of the vulnerabilities in attacks, its co-author Ethan Heilman publicly solicited developers to analyze the opcode's potential vulnerabilities in 2019, but did not receive any response.
The introduction of OP_CAT is very different from most Bitcoin expansion plans. Most expansion plans will choose to introduce smart contracts by supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Ethereum's Solidity programming language.
Fractal Ecological Subsidy Program
To date, more than 100 projects have announced plans to launch on Fractal. Fractal has also launched a grant program to fund developers looking to build new applications on its platform, with focus areas including decentralized finance (DeFi), games and NFTs.
Fractal will also launch decentralized exchange PizzaSwap on the network and plans to support existing Bitcoin token standards, including BRC-20, Runes and Ordinals.
