Author: Weilin, PANews

Since Fractal Bitcoin was launched on the mainnet on September 9, the growth momentum has been very significant. One month after the mainnet went online, the TPS of the Fractal mainnet stabilized at 200+ tx/s. Within 30 days, 900,000+ currency holding addresses were generated, and 347 million on-chain transactions were created. The average daily on-chain transaction volume More than 10 million transactions. On October 12, UniSat announced on the X platform that the UniSat Runes market has been officially launched on the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet. On October 15th, Fractal Bitcoin announced the first-quarter grant recipients and opened applications for the second-quarter grant. All grant recipients in the first quarter will each receive 5,000 FB. Although the project is still in its early stages, these data and progress show that Fractal Bitcoin is attracting widespread attention and active participation.

PANews recently talked with UniSat founder Lorenzo, and had an in-depth discussion on topics of concern to users, such as the optimization of brc20 and runes, how to view the value and potential of various assets, the latest progress of the project and the roadmap for the next few months. Currently, PizzaSwap has been launched, and users have successfully created liquidity and conducted transactions. Lorenzo believes that the implementation of PizzaSwap is of great significance to the development of the BRC20 protocol.

Lorenzo said that most of the doubts and negative opinions currently faced are about the functionality and experience of supporting facilities. Criticism is a very good motivation and can help the team to continuously calibrate product delivery. Lorenzo also shared the roadmap for the next few months. Runes has been introduced, CAT20 will be promoted, governance, Swap and protocol upgrades will be promoted, and cross-chain Swap and PizzaSwap will be enhanced.

The following is a detailed transcript of the interview:

PANews: Since the launch of the mainnet on September 9, how has Fractal Bitcoin's user participation and market response been? Can you share some relevant data?

Lorenzo: Fractal is still in its early stages, and it has only been five months since we started testing the network. The enthusiasm and in-depth research on Fractal on social media is beyond our expectations. Whether good or bad, the voices are all about Fractal, and we are very grateful for your support.

One month after the mainnet was launched, we observed that the TPS of the Fractal mainnet was stable at 200+ tx/s, more than 900,000 coin holding addresses were generated within 30 days, 347 million on-chain transactions were created, and the average daily on-chain transaction volume exceeded 10 million transactions. As of October 13, the average daily on-chain transaction volume exceeded 15M transactions in the past 7 days.

From the perspective of mining and computing power, the computing power of Fracral joint mining (380EH/s) has now steadily exceeded half of the computing power of the entire Bitcoin network (650EH/s). The mechanism of joint mining ensures the security of the Fractal network. We are very happy with this data and thank the miners and mining pools for their support.

Of course, all these data are very macro and can only form an overall impression of Fractal. The short-term popularity is a great encouragement for us, but it is just the beginning for the project. We still have a long way to go and need to continue to work hard to repay the trust of the community.

PANews: In the Fractal Bitcoin ecosystem, users can mint various types of assets, such as tokens based on the CAT20 protocol, assets based on the BRC20 protocol, assets based on the Stamp protocol, as well as domain names and small pictures. These have all received considerable attention. Recently, you also open-sourced the BRC20 protocol based on Fractal. Which assets are currently performing well? How do you view the value and potential of various assets? What does the future look like?

Lorenzo: It is really gratifying to see that in addition to the ordinarys and brc20 that we natively support, there are so many interesting protocols coming to Fractal. It is also very interesting to observe the transactions on the chain, see which protocols and assets users prefer, and how consensus is generated. The blockchain makes everything so transparent and direct.

Different protocols have different features and trade-offs. We will try our best to provide network-level support for them at this stage. We look forward to technical innovations based on the native features of Fractal, but from the perspective of infrastructure support, we will not have a particular preference and try to remain relatively neutral without obvious tendencies. In the future, we will focus on optimizing mature protocols such as brc20 and runes, provide better interoperability with the Bitcoin mainnet, and provide better infrastructure support for cat20.

PANews: Due to the high enthusiasm for Stamp asset minting, the relevant minting platform experienced downtime from September 26 to September 27, causing dissatisfaction among some users. How does Fractal Bitcoin view such incidents? Will it intervene and provide guidance on the subsequent handling of the project?

Lorenzo: In the early days of the launch of Ordinals and brc-20 last year, our UniSat Marketplace also had serious bugs, which led to dozens of fraudulent transactions in the market. Our minting platform also had frequent errors when the network was congested, and at the end of last year it was DDOSed and had to be maintained intermittently. So I fully understand the challenges that projects encounter in new protocols and network environments.

Especially in the past 30 days since the launch of the Fractal mainnet, users have engraved a total of approximately 278 million inscriptions, with an average of more than 9 million inscriptions created every day. Our team has been under great system pressure, and I believe it is also a big challenge for different project parties.

We believe that excellent projects can stand out in such a harsh environment. For ecological projects, we will try our best to provide technical support, and welcome everyone to come to us for exchanges and discussions.

PANews: There are many potential teams in Fractal Bitcoin's Grants project, such as DeTrading and sCrypt. How is the current progress with these partners? We saw that the official Twitter account recently announced a partnership with Bool Network. What plans do you have for ecology and cooperation?

Lorenzo: The cooperation is progressing as planned, and the progress will be synchronized with everyone at the right time. The most important thing in the early stage is to lay a good foundation. We will actively promote cooperation with cross-chain solutions, wallets, indexes, and miners. At the same time, we are also contacting various protocols and application layer projects, such as Vault, DEX, derivatives and other DeFi teams, as well as games, NFTs, social networking, etc., and actively support their deployment work. Some teams are really doing very interesting things, which will have a very positive impact not only on Fractal, but also on the entire BTC ecosystem. I think they will announce it to everyone when they are ready.

The Fractal Ecosystem Grants project is based on a retrospective system. For the grant recipients of Season 0, they have invested a lot of work in Fractal, developed excellent platforms and products, and made positive contributions to the ecosystem. We hope that in the future, multiple forces will continue to join and participate in this ecosystem, integrate and communicate with each other, and open up the situation together. What we are looking for is a partner who can build with us for a long time; a partner who can not only make their own products well, but also provide support and value to other ecological projects. In the next few months, we will pay more attention to promoting the developer community with our partners, and encourage everyone to build with new technologies such as CAT protocol through continuous offline activities, builder houses and targeted grants. We will also continue to provide them with support for technical implementation, suggestions for product conception, and guidance on marketing strategies.

In addition, whether the project is funded or not, we will arrange time with many teams to communicate and follow up regularly or as needed to help them better advance the development of their projects. This is not only to promote the development of the entire ecosystem, but also to ensure that we can help these projects achieve greater success.

We will announce the Season 1 grant recipients in October (PANews note: announced on October 15), as described in our public roadmap build.fractalbitcoin.io, and we will share details of Season 2 soon thereafter.

PANews: What impact will the recently launched Pizza Swap have on the ecosystem? What are the team's expectations for this?

Lorenzo: PizzaSwap is now live, and users have successfully created liquidity and conducted transactions. We are very happy to receive feedback from users, which is of great help to us in improving our products. PizzaSwap aims to openly support all protocols that users care about through a modular system.

We believe that the implementation of PizzaSwap is of great significance to the development of the BRC20 protocol. On the BTC mainnet, as one of the maintainers of the BRC20 protocol, we respect the governance rules of the protocol; on Fractal, we can demonstrate the value of modular solutions, which can be flexibly expanded without affecting the BRC20 core, save block space through innovative transaction packaging methods, and construct a continuous incentive model. We will continue to improve the functions of PizzaSwap in Q4, such as the FB support launched this week. Please pay attention to our subsequent function updates.

PANews: As the Layer 2 for Bitcoin expansion, Fractal Bitcoin has faced some controversy since its launch, including questions about "lack of functional pegging mechanism and not being a true L2". What does the project team think of these views?

Lorenzo: Fractal Bitcoin has never been a so-called Bitcoin Layer 2. Fractal is a Bitcoin scaling solution that leverages the Bitcoin Core software through recursive layers to extend Bitcoin's scalability. Fractal's goal is to provide an innovative platform for developers, and we have seen that the applications built by the ecosystem and our team are very useful to users - such as block explorers, wallets, exchanges, markets, support for native protocols such as BRC-20, Runes, Ordinals, and support for new protocols such as CAT protocol, bridge implementations, mining pool integrations, etc., which were launched in just one month after the Fractal mainnet launch. We welcome constructive feedback and look forward to learning and improving from the community. Regarding Bitcoin on Fractal, users can bridge Bitcoin to bBTC or sBTC into Fractal through Bool Bridge or SimpleBridge. There may also be other bridge implementations in the future.

Most of the doubts and negative opinions we are facing now are about the functionality and experience of the supporting facilities. What everyone does not realize is that in fact, during this process, Fractal and related protocols and products were successfully launched with doubts. After a period of review, I realized that for a system like Fractal that has technological breakthroughs and is huge, our overall execution was very good. Everyone only sees what we deliver, and the team’s most time-consuming and energy-consuming work is actually behind the scenes, at the bottom, solving various problems to ensure that no major omissions occur, so that everyone does not feel these in daily life. We must also maintain this state consistently, and optimize some functional and experience issues on the basis of ensuring that the foundation is strong enough.

Criticism is a great motivator for us and helps us continuously calibrate our product delivery.

PANews: Since the issuance of FB, the price of the currency has fallen. Some FB miners said that the price has reached the shutdown price for some miners. What do you think about this situation?

Lorenzo: We do not comment on prices, but do expect a fair amount of volatility in the early stages. Prices are a reflection of supply and demand in the market. We appreciate miners participating in the Cadence Mining mechanism (a combination of permissionless mining and merged mining).

Fractal's mining mechanism itself determines that miners can switch to free mining at any time or participate in joint mining at a lower cost, and the reduction in computing power of free mining will not affect the overall security of the network. Unlike Bitcoin, Fractal does not have a relatively clear shutdown price. Due to the existence of joint mining, we have observed that the overall change in Fractal's computing power tends to be stable and consistent, and the degree of turbulence is far less than that of the POW system of the same period.

PANews: The Bitcoin expansion track is becoming increasingly crowded. Why did Fractal Bitcoin choose the sidechain technology path? What do you think of the current "a hundred flowers blooming" competition situation?

Lorenzo: It is actually a good thing that more projects are paying attention to capacity expansion, which means that the entire ecosystem has more attention, more liquidity, more high-quality projects and investors. I think it is also a good thing for users to have more choices.

At this stage, Fractal Bitcoin can be seen as a sidechain parallel to Bitcoin, but this is far from the typical form of the system. A system constructed with multiple fractal instances that can support various use cases is resilient and robust.

PANews: Compared with other Bitcoin scaling projects, what are the core advantages of Fractal Bitcoin?

Lorenzo: The positive feedback we received from the community is that Fractal Bitcoin is truly built on top of Bitcoin.

Fractal's POW mechanism is in line with Bitcoin, and in the long run it can make up for the problem of insufficient miner incentives caused by halving.

Many users really appreciate the simple user experience we provide to the end user, including the fact that their receiving addresses (e.g. Taproot, Native SegWit) are consistent on both the Bitcoin network and Fractal Bitcoin. They also like being able to scale their applications from Bitcoin to Fractal, and back from Fractal to Bitcoin when necessary.

In addition, everyone should be aware of the activation of OP_CAT on Fractal. This allows Fractal to greatly enhance the programmability of the network while maintaining a high degree of consistency with the main network. Innovations based on this, such as Cat Protocol, are strong proof of Fractal's positioning as the best "testing ground" for the BTC main network. Fractal has created a BTC-native, real user interaction and market environment, and higher-performance test field. The successful cases generated through this test field are likely to have an impact on the development direction of the BTC main network, and may further promote the resurrection of OP_CAT on the BTC main network. This may be the next turning point for the Bitcoin ecosystem after the Inscription Protocol realizes the issuance of coins on BTC.

PANews: How does Fractal Bitcoin encourage community members to participate in the construction of the Fractal Bitcoin ecosystem? Are there plans to introduce more incentive mechanisms in the future?

Lorenzo: Incentives are a double-edged sword that can have a big impact when used correctly. With strong incentives come great responsibilities, and we recognize our responsibility in guiding the community. Many developers choose to build on Fractal because they appreciate and identify with the possibilities that Fractal brings. They never ask us for funding, and we only support them after the fact because they contribute to the ecosystem and help them achieve long-term success. Some teams ask us if we will provide funding before deciding whether to build on Fractal, otherwise they will not participate. We find that these teams tend to be more pragmatic or have less intrinsic motivation. Since the grant amount is not large, we know that it will not really incentivize these teams, so we prefer to spend our time on teams with more passion and potential. Overall, we are very grateful for the high-quality teams currently building on Fractal and will continue to improve in the future. Stay tuned for our new season of grants, hackathons, developer focus events, and more exciting content.

PANews: What are Fractal Bitcoin's main goals and plans for the coming months? Is it possible for FB to be listed on mainstream exchanges and increase liquidity?

Lorenzo: Our public roadmap for technology and ecology has been published at build.fractalbitcoin.io. We are happy to support technical integration including fiat currency in and out channels. As for other liquidity issues, there is no further comment at this time.

Here are some highlights from the roadmap:

October: Introducing Runes and advancing CAT20

November: Governance, Swap, and Protocol Upgrades

December: Further enhancements to cross-chain Swap and PizzaSwap

PANews: When do you expect and anticipate the next explosion of the Fractal ecosystem to occur?

Lorenzo: Just as Ordinals exploded on the Bitcoin mainnet earlier, Fractal's innovation and rapid growth can happen at any time in the future due to the continuous emergence of innovation. What we can do is to continuously improve the infrastructure and provide good soil for the seeds of innovation.