Author: Jessy Golden Finance
The market is bleak, and the performance of the Bitcoin ecosystem is not satisfactory. The low price of the currency is a good time to rethink the current status and future development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Recently, Inscription Sats has tripled from its recent lowest point, which is a rare bright spot in the sluggish market. The reason behind its counter-trend is that the Unisat team has empowered it and stated that it will use it as the gas fee for its Swap product.
Unisat is a project that is hard to avoid in the Bitcoin ecosystem. After the inscription became popular, it quickly launched a platform that integrates inscription deployment, casting, and trading, as well as a Bitcoin wallet, which simplified the process of everyone participating in the inscription ecosystem. It became famous overnight and laid the foundation for Unisat to establish its status in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
In September, Fractal, the second layer of Bitcoin developed by Unisat, will be launched on the mainnet. Today, Unisat is no longer just a wallet company or a Swap. Unisat has invested in, built, or openly supported many projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
These projects include Bitcoin's second-layer expansion solutions, Bitcoin chain games, developer services, and more.
Today, UniSat has evolved from an open-source wallet to an engraving service, to a protocol contributor, to a developer service provider, to an infrastructure provider, and now to a Bitcoin expansion solution implementer. Has it done enough? In the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, can what it has done become an industry template? And what is Unisat's real ambition?
Supporters of the Bitcoin big block, accumulating wealth in the BSV ecosystem and making a breakthrough with the help of inscriptions
Data shows that since its launch, more than 50% of inscriptions have been created by UniSat Inscribe, and more than 80% of BRC-20s have been traded on the UniSat market.
Unisat was originally an open source Bitcoin wallet. It became well-known because of the popularity of inscriptions. As a wallet, it also has tools for minting and trading, and is widely used by users. At that time, Unisat was not the only one doing similar things, but Unisat won the battle.
The core point is that the team itself has a lot of experience in developing large Bitcoin blocks, which enabled them to continuously iterate products and quickly respond to market needs at the time.
If we count down what Unisat did during the first spring of Inscription, we can see that the team kept up with the needs of the market. In February 2023, the wallet and Inscribe were launched, the search function was launched in March, and the market and rune support of the product were optimized in April...
It is understood that the team members of Unisat are supporters of Bitcoin large blocks. They participated in the Bitcoin fork that year and have been involved in the development of BSV since then.
In the industry, a product that directly meets user needs has to bear enormous pressure on the product technology level. In the first spring of Inscription, Unisat was able to stand out quickly, thanks to its relatively long-term accumulation of relevant development experience. It took a long time to make a breakthrough and seize the opportunity. The right time, right place and right people are all indispensable. From this point of view, Unisat is lucky.
After gaining a foothold in the Bitcoin ecosystem, Unisat needs to think about how to survive for a long time, or even how to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem so that it can enjoy the dividends of this track for a long time. While expanding the Bitcoin ecosystem, another very important point is how to consolidate its position as the "big brother"?
After reviewing what Unisat has done in the past year or so, we will find that Unisat’s main task has been to optimize its existing products and keep up with user needs in line with the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Several important time nodes are as follows:
In October 2023, UniSat Wallet successfully launched its BRC-20-swap mainnet, which is an AMM-based Dex. Unlike other Dex, it only trades BRC-20 tokens. The BRC-20 swap mainnet enables users to seamlessly exchange BRC-20 tokens on Bitcoin, instead of having to trade on a centralized third-party platform using an order book model.
The greatest significance of brc20-swap to the Bitcoin ecosystem lies in the injection of liquidity, allowing more money to flow in and making transactions more convenient.
Based on this success, UniSat subsequently launched the UniSat Developer Service. They hope to use a series of developer tools to help developers develop in the Bitcoin ecosystem and make the pie bigger together.
Unisat's influence in the industry has indeed grown gradually. In a very significant manifestation, in January 2024, UniSat proposed the "Jubilee" update of the BRC-20 protocol fork. The goal of this fork is to make BRC-20 work properly by changing the rules of the Ordinals protocol.
Unisat's insistence on following Ordinals' upgrade was opposed and criticized by BRC20 founder Domo. The criticism and struggle between the two is actually a fight for control over the BRC-20 protocol.
In this matter, each side had its own insistence, and in the end, the camp represented by Domo won, and Unisat gave up its upgrade plan. However, this debate in the Bitcoin ecosystem also indicates that Unisat has already had a heavyweight influence in the ecosystem.
With the Brc-20 swap, Unisat can basically be positioned in the Bitcoin ecosystem as Uniswap on Ethereum. More details and even actions later also showed Unisat’s ambition, which is not just to be a trading tool for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Unisat's ultimate goal is gaming
Unisat currently has three main development lines. One is to provide products and services for Bitcoin ecosystem transactions, such as the wallet, inscription market, and even the subsequent BRC-20swap. It is also the foundation of its foothold in the industry.
The second line is Bitcoin Layer 2, and the third line is games.
In terms of the second layer, Unisat has developed Fractal, which uses the Pow consensus mechanism, and more than 50% of the tokens are produced by mining. The main network will be launched in September.
Unlike other Bitcoin second layers, Fractal is the only native Bitcoin expansion solution that uses the Bitcoin Core code and is highly consistent with Bitcoin. For users, this feature provides the following experience: the address format is the same as the main network address, and the original wallets, tools, and mining machines can be used. This creates a more convenient way of use.
Fractal actually builds a foundation and a highway for what Unisat wants to do more. In an interview with the media, Unisat founder Lorenzo said that there are three main types of applications related to Fractal: the first type is the bridge, which is an application that helps assets flow between the Bitcoin mainnet and the Fractal mainnet. The second type is transaction-related, such as native Swap, DEX, NFT Marketplace, etc. The third type may be those that have been suppressed on the Bitcoin layer due to the limited block size, such as DID applications, certificate issuance applications, voting governance applications, etc. This type of application is for frequent participation and interaction of a large number of users.
The third main line of Unisat's development is actually in this third category of applications, and it is more subdivided, that is, games.
UniWorlds is a Bitcoin blockchain game infrastructure provider invested by Unisat. In addition to investing in blockchain game infrastructure, Unisat has also invested in several specific Bitcoin blockchain games, including the well-known blockchain game OrdzGames, the world's first GameFi+DEPIN gaming device Bitboy, and so on.
Unisat's bitcoin blockchain game seems to have nothing to do with its previous business, and it also seems to be because Unisat wants to create a bitcoin ecological universe. But the more fundamental reason may be that games are the ultimate dream of founder Lorenzo.
Awakening Capital, which invested in Unisat, commented on Lorenzo: a typical tech geek who came from a gaming background. Lorenzo once told Awakening Capital that his ultimate dream in life is to make a game that 8 billion people around the world can play online at the same time, and only the Bitcoin network can support this dream.
Lorenzo's ultimate goal is still games, which explains why Unisat invests in and incubates games.
By analyzing Unisat’s business direction, we can also find that Unisat is catering to market demands by making wallets, markets, and even Swaps, and the former two are actions that are at the forefront of the market. When Swap was born, the waves of the Bitcoin ecosystem had actually slowed down a lot. When it came to building the second layer and games, Unisat was not limited to building roads and bridges, it also wanted to introduce massive traffic into the Bitcoin ecosystem. In Unisat’s view, blockchain games and the Bitcoin ecosystem may complement each other.
Today, as an observer, we can clearly see the development of Unisat's ambitions in the Bitcoin ecosystem and even its future. For the people on the Unisat team, the fact that they have reached today and can be seen by the industry is the result of their years of practical accumulation and belief in the Bitcoin big block. For this reason, they missed the last bull market, but also reaped the rewards in this bull market.
The current Bitcoin ecosystem is in a downturn, which is also a good time to do things in a down-to-earth manner.
