Original author:dt
Original translation: Lisa
This week's crypto market started a strong rebound after Federal Reserve Chairman Powell gave clear instructions for interest rate cuts at the Jackson Hole meeting. Bitcoin led a number of altcoins to see a rare general rise in August.
Bitcoin-related concepts have always been the biggest catalyst in this cycle. The launch of BTC ETF has ignited various tokens and projects in the Bitcoin chain ecosystem. This week, Dr.DODO will introduce a Bitcoin-related project, Fractal Bitcoin, which has been in full swing in the testnet public beta recently. Let Dr.DODO take you to see what Fractal Bitcoin is.
What is Fractal Bitcoin?
Fractal Bitcoin was born out of the long-standing scalability problem of the Bitcoin network. As Bitcoin became more popular, the surge in network transactions led to longer transaction confirmation times and higher fees. For many years, the Bitcoin community has been seeking solutions to this problem, such as second-layer solutions such as the Lightning Network. However, these solutions often require additional infrastructure or complex operations.
Against this backdrop, the UniSat team came up with the concept of Fractal Bitcoin, with the goal of creating a scaling solution that can be seamlessly integrated into the Bitcoin ecosystem, without requiring major modifications to the Bitcoin core protocol while significantly improving network performance.
Fractal Bitcoin is inspired by fractal geometry, and improves transaction processing capabilities and speed by recursively creating infinite expansion layers on the Bitcoin main chain, while maintaining full compatibility with the existing Bitcoin ecosystem. Its core idea is to use Bitcoin's own core code to create a tree-like expansion structure, each layer can be further expanded, thereby greatly improving the parallel processing capabilities of the entire network.
Source: https://www.fractalbitcoin.io/
Technical Features of Fractal Bitcoin
Core Technology: Uses Bitcoin Core code and directly leverages the security and reliability of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Expansion method: Create a tree structure through recursive expansion layers to increase the parallel processing capabilities of the entire network.
Performance improvement: Block confirmation time is about 30 seconds, and transaction processing capacity is 20 times that of the Bitcoin main chain.
Compatibility: Fully compatible with existing Bitcoin wallets, tools and mining equipment.
Mining method: Supports two methods: permissionless mining and merged mining.
Security: All transactions can ultimately be traced back to the Bitcoin main chain, ensuring security and verifiability.
Dynamic adjustment: The number of expansion layers can be automatically adjusted according to the degree of network congestion.
Source: https://www.fractalbitcoin.io/about
Fractal Bitcoin Ecosystem
The Fractal Bitcoin ecosystem is developing rapidly, and several promising projects have emerged:
UniWorlds: A metaverse project built on Fractal Bitcoin that provides customizable virtual spaces.
InfinityAI: An AI project that provides testing tasks and point rewards.
Satspumpfun: A copycat of the pump.fun coin issuance platform on Fractal Bitcoin.
Motoswap: Fractal Bitcoin on-chain DEX project.
Although the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet has not been officially launched, many of the above projects have been deployed on the testnet and are available for player testing. There are also many test tasks on InfinityAI to help players become familiar with on-chain operations.
Fractal Bitcoin Status
Fractal Bitcoin is currently in the testnet stage. You can go to the official faucet website to claim test tokens, or mine through the testnet. Fractal Bitcoin uses the same PoW consensus mechanism as Bitcoin. BTC miners can use current ASICs, GPUs and other existing hardware to seamlessly switch to Fractal block mining, and provide an original merged mining mechanism Cadence Mining, which combines the two mining modes of permissionless mining and merge mining. Every 3 blocks is a cycle, 2 blocks are generated through "permissionless mining" and 1 block is generated through "merge mining".
Permissionless mining: Allows anyone with the right tools and hardware to mine Fractal blocks, similar to how BTC is mined.
Merged mining: Specifically for BTC miners, it allows miners to mine BTC blocks and Fractal blocks at the same time without taking up additional computing power.
According to the official website, the mainnet will be officially launched in September.
Source: https://explorer-testnet.fractalbitcoin.io/
Fractal Bitcoin’s Potential and Impact
Fractal Bitcoin is expected to significantly improve the transaction efficiency of the Bitcoin network. Through its innovative recursive expansion layer structure, Fractal Bitcoin can significantly increase transaction speed and processing capabilities, which will not only improve the user experience, but may also contribute to Bitcoin's daily payment and micro-transactions. The field opens up new application scenarios.
In addition, Fractal Bitcoin provides developers with a broader space for innovation. Due to its compatibility with the Bitcoin core code, developers can explore new possibilities within a familiar technical framework, thereby promoting innovation in the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
Author's opinion
The biggest highlight of Fractal Bitcoin is definitely that it comes from the Unisat team, which is jointly invested by Binance and OKX. The performance of the Unisat team in the brc 20 trading market is beyond the reach of all other products. In addition, its previously issued token asset $PIZZA also performed well in terms of currency price and won the praise of many retail investors.
But putting aside the team's halo, the author cannot see any obvious advantages of Fractal Bitcoin over other public chains based on Bitcoin in the project documents or official website. The author believes that the project party also has many shortcomings in introducing the basic knowledge of Fractal Bitcoin. For example, the documents and official website are too simple and do not disclose the details of Fractal Bitcoin's operation. The documents generally explain how to use Fractal Bitcoin but do not introduce how Fractal Bitcoin itself works.
In addition, as to whether Bitcoin really needs a public chain to achieve functionality, the author believes that there is still no such demand. Before Fractal Bitcoin, many Bitcoin L2 public chains have been launched, such as Merlin, B² Network, etc., none of which have been favored by real players. Most assets are only at the airdrop mining stage. Most players on the Bitcoin ecosystem chain do not need complex functions, but only hype the concept of Bitcoin chain assets.
Of course, since Fractal Bitcoin does not adopt the L2 form in terms of architecture, but rather adopts the form of self-POW mining, which is more like a side chain, perhaps the participation of miners can prevent its popularity from dying out as soon as it goes online.
The author also expects Fractal Bitcoin to be able to play in a different way from other public chains, whether it is the Ethereum Defi ecosystem or the new token issuance gimmicks such as Brc 20 and Rune on native Bitcoin.
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