What is Fractal Bitcoin?

Fractal Bitcoin, led by Bitcoin wallet provider UniSat and Web3 investment firm Block Space Force, announced that its first memory block was mined on September 9th, marking the official launch of the main network of this Bitcoin sidechain. This project aims to enhance the scalability of Bitcoin by using Bitcoin Core code, which is different from other Bitcoin scaling solutions.

Lorenzo, the head of UniSat and a core contributor to Fractal, stated:

The launch of Fractal on the mainnet is a critical 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 architectures

Fractal represents scalability achieved through a technique called 'recursive layering', which allows for the creation of multiple independent layers on top of Bitcoin, each capable of increasing the throughput of Bitcoin's Layer 1 by 20 times. Officially, transactions executed on Bitcoin Layer 1 will take approximately 10 minutes to confirm, while the confirmation time for memory blocks in Fractal will be less than 30 seconds,

Since its launch on the testnet in July, Fractal has attracted 1.5 million independent addresses and processed 13.6 million transactions. According to UniSat's data, the current computing power of the network is 11.23 exahash/s, accounting for approximately 1.9% of Bitcoin's total computing power.

However, after the launch of the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet, there were many voices of doubt in the community.

Fractal pre excavation dispute

The native token FB of Fractal was also launched simultaneously on September 9th, but half of the total tokens have been pre mined, with 15% allocated to core contributors, 15% to ecosystem vaults, 10% for community subsidies, 5% for advisors, and 5% for pre-sale investors. The remaining 50% of tokens will be used as rewards for proof of work miners.

Fractal uses a hybrid merge mining mechanism called Cadence Mining. One out of every three Fractal memory blocks will be merged with the Bitcoin mainnet for mining, while the remaining two memory blocks will be mined natively. Merging mining memory blocks allows Bitcoin miners to participate in the security maintenance of fractals.

The issuance of tokens follows a two-year halving cycle, with 52.5 million tokens released in the first two years and 25 FB tokens rewarded for each memory block. Fractal also plans to introduce a tokenization governance mechanism based on FB in the future.

However, Fractal has been criticized for its pre excavation behavior. Mempool founder Mononaut pointed out that pre mined tokens can be used immediately, which leads to excessive concentration of control over token supply in the hands of insiders. Mononaut tweeted:

If everything goes according to plan, it will take miners two years (i.e. half of the entire Fractal cycle) to mine half of the tokens allocated to them by the founders on the first day

In addition, Mononaut described Fractal as a "hastily copied" version of the Bitcoin core v24.0.1 codebase, with only some consensus modifications and "code copied from Namecoin and Bitcoin Cash" added. He said, "In my opinion, this is just a low-quality forked coin

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 was concerned that the opcode could become one of the vulnerabilities for attacks, his co-author Ethan Heilman publicly solicited developers to analyze the potential vulnerabilities of the opcode in 2019, but did not receive any response.

The approach of introducing OP-CAT differs significantly from most Bitcoin scaling schemes, which choose to introduce smart contracts through support for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Ethereum's Solidity programming language.

Fractal Ecological Subsidy Program

So far, over 100 projects have announced plans to launch on Fractal. Fractal has also launched a subsidy program to support developers who wish to build new applications on its platform, with a focus on decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, and NFTs.

Fractal will also launch a decentralized exchange called PizzaSwap on the network and plans to support existing Bitcoin token standards, including BRC-20, Runes, and Ordinals.