Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author: Golem (@web3_golem)
Since the launch of the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet, hot projects have surged one after another. Before the so-called first token protocol FLUX was fully digested (recommended reading "Over-the-counter price surged 60 times, what is the origin of FLUX, the so-called first token protocol of Fractal?"), a new token protocol called CAT Protocol stole the limelight yesterday.
CAT Protocol’s first token CAT has a total of 21 million, 5 coins per CAT, for a total of 4.2 million coins; the current minting progress is about 35%, and it will take about 2 days to complete the minting at the current progress. As the popularity increases, the Fractal Bitcoin network fee has soared from 100 to more than 1500.
Why does CAT cause such FOMO among players? Is it worth participating? In this article, Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce the characteristics of CAT Protocol, the reasons for its popularity, proxy gaming websites, and the cost of participation, etc., hoping to be helpful to readers.
Complete token standard design
CAT Protocol consists of two parts, one is the homogeneous token standard CAT 20, and the other is the non-homogeneous token standard CAT 721. Currently, only CAT 20 is launched in the official documents. If you read the CAT 20 technical documentation carefully, you will find that the token design of CAT Protocol is relatively complete from deployment to minting logic. The following is a brief summary of the characteristics of CAT 20 tokens:
CAT 20 token names are not unique. Similar to ERC 20, anyone can deploy a token with the same name/symbol, so there will be no "token name grabbing" like BRC 20 and Rune;
Use contracts to manage token minting and transfer. When spending UTXO to mint new tokens, new Minter UTXOs are generated, and these UTXOs can be used to recursively mint more tokens. Although the UTXOs will be merged, the number of tokens will be retained. Therefore, the phenomenon of burning CAT assets because UTXO containing assets is used in the input of the minting transaction may not actually exist.
The issuance and minting rules are more flexible. Unlike indexer-based protocols, CAT 20 token issuers can define arbitrary minting rules without making any changes to the underlying protocol, including: supporting paid minting, limiting minting time and height, setting POW mining mechanism, whitelist minting mechanism and similar pledge minting rules. Please see the official documentation for details.
Supports decentralized and centralized issuance methods. CAT 20 supports decentralized minting, similar to BRC 20, where the token issuer only sets the parameters and anyone can participate in minting new tokens; it also supports centralized minting, where only the token issuer can mint tokens.
Supports functions such as pre-mining and token destruction.
Proxy platforms are launched one after another
Although these features are enough to fascinate some technology enthusiasts, they are still in the documents, and the community is still trying to figure out how to transfer money. Currently, all players can do is mint, and in addition to building their own nodes, some proxy platforms are also being launched, as listed below:
CoinTool: Those who played multi-chain inscriptions last year may be familiar with this platform. It has also launched the CAT 20 proxy tool. At that time, it was still mainly used by users to import wallet mnemonics, which had certain risks. Interested friends can use small addresses for testing.
bitatom: A tool developed by independent developer ZEN. Previously, he independently developed the Atomicals trading market, which has a high degree of community trust. Currently, the platform can only display the CAT casting progress. The casting function is still under development and I believe it will be launched soon.
Runetoshi: Actually, it is a paid proxy service, not a platform. Users need to open a ticket in their Discord and send a FB to it. And each minting costs 0.2 FB, which is quite expensive. In fact, there are many proxy services in the community. Players can find them in the community by themselves, but they should also pay attention to the risk of fraud.
CAT 20 has only been online for 2 days, and the market has reacted very quickly. I believe that better tools will be launched soon to reduce the gap in participation barriers among players.
UniSat Support, Who is Behind CAT 20?
The CAT Protocol team is still in a "mysterious" state. The official X account only posted one tweet and then there was no further news, like a stone thrown into the market, which sank to the bottom after making a splash.
If only because the design of the CAT 20 token is perfect, it will not cause large-scale FOMO. After all, not everyone has the time and interest to read the document. What really caused large-scale FOMO and pulled the minting Gas to more than 1500 was that UniSat updated the Fractal browser last night and added the CAT 20 page.
This silent update was interpreted by the community as "premeditated", and they suspected that UniSat was the support team behind CAT 20. However, on the Twitter space "Ord My God" hosted by the community last night, Vivian, a member of the Unisat and Fractal team, was quite implicit and conservative in her answer to this question, and did not clearly explain the relationship with CAT 20. "All projects built on Fractal are officially willing to support, and this update can be regarded more as a test."
At the same time, some community members speculated that the team behind CAT Protocol is the sCrypt Official team, which has been working in the OP_CAT field for a long time. The reason is that their technical understanding of OP_CAT is enough to propose such a complete token protocol, and the style and fonts in the official documents of CAT Protocol are consistent with the habits of sCrypt Official.
On the left is the CAT Protocol official document, on the right is the sCrypt Official tweet
If the speculation is correct, the sCrypt Official team has previously received 10,000 FB funding from the Fractal ecosystem Season 0, proving that the two parties have already cooperated. It is not surprising that UniSat supports CAT 20 this time.
In addition to CAT Protocol’s CAT 20, there are now two other CAT protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem. One is Danny, the founder of opnet, who claims to have invented CAT 20 in August and will activate it after block 21,000 on the Fractal mainnet; the other is Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cat, who will also release a token protocol CATNIP based on OP_CAT, but it only supports the Bitcoin mainnet.
It seems that the token protocol driven by OP_CAT has formed a "three-kingdoms competition" situation. At present, the CAT Protocol supported by UniSat has the upper hand. The CAT Protocol can run on any UTXO chain that activates OP_CAT, which means that in the future, when the Bitcoin mainnet supports OP_CAT, it can also be migrated to the mainnet.
The one who sells shovels gets rich first
At present, the OTC bid price of CAT is 2 USDT/piece (5 pieces), but the transaction volume is relatively low, which may be due to the fact that it can still be minted or the transfer is not smooth. The following is a CAT minting cost table made by the community. At present, the Fractal network fee level is around 1800-2000, and the cost of minting one piece is about 2 USDT. Now there is not much profit in minting. But if CAT is minted at a fee rate below 200, then the current profit is more than 10 times.
It's unclear whether there was actually enough gold to make the adventurers rich during the San Francisco Gold Rush, but those who sold jeans and shovels in the mines did make money.
On CAT 20, in addition to the early minters who are now making considerable profits (if they can sell them), those who have already made money are players who provide proxy games, proxy deployments, and sell FB tokens. All three are the "shovels" needed to mint CAT.
It is difficult to evaluate proxy trading and proxy deployment without public data, but the trend of FB supply and demand has been reflected in the price - the price rose from $15 before CAT casting to $30 in less than a day. Currently, users can trade FB in the community OTC, Bitcoin decentralized exchange DotSwap and centralized exchange coinex. Data shows that the current circulation of FB is about 1.27 million, with a circulation market value of about $38.34 million and a total market value of $6.3 billion.
How long can attention alone last?
FLUX, which claims to be the first Fractal token protocol, has faded from people's horizons, and its over-the-counter transactions are also bleak. FLUX used the narrative point of "First is first" to capture early traffic. Today's CAT 20, on the one hand, grasps the "traditional pursuit" of difficulty and threshold in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and on the other hand, it has the blessing of UniSat, which has once again attracted the attention of players.
Although CAT 20 has certain advantages in design, it is essentially a product of the attention economy. But how long can this attention economy last?
In fact, many new token protocols have appeared on the Bitcoin mainnet. They all have their own "innovations" and "characteristics", and they have also caused FOMO in the off-site market, but they still cannot escape the fate of extinction, such as huge, veda, cbrc 20, Compos Protocol (cpos) and Orddefi. Fractal may also go the same way, and most players can only keep gambling as before, without any skills, and continue to consume attention and chips.
