The issue of expansion has always been the key direction of BTC ecological development, but as the overall popularity of the sector declines, many BTC ecological creative projects, including various expansion plans, have gradually faded out of people’s sight. However, behind the impetuous market sentiment, “still working” is still an appropriate description of the status of many project teams.
Yesterday, Fractal, a native extension solution based on BTC core code and supported by UniSat, opened its official water channel. Combined with the previous news that Unisat will launch Fractal Bitcoin in September, the editor couldn’t help but become interested in this project, so he went to the Fractal official website to take a look and get a general understanding of the special features of this project.
Original, “orthodox” improvement based on the BTC main chain?
According to the official self-introduction, Fractal Bitcoin improves transaction processing capabilities and speed by recursively creating an infinite expansion layer on the BTC main chain using the BTC core code, while maintaining full compatibility with the existing Bitcoin ecosystem.
In short, Fractal is an extension of the BTC core code, with the following features:
Fast transaction speed: The block confirmation time of the Fractal network is about 30 seconds, and the transaction processing capacity is 20 times that of the BTC main chain.
Native compatibility: Fractal Bitcoin is developed based on the BTC core code, so it is fully compatible with existing Bitcoin wallets, tools and mining equipment.
Dynamic Adjustment: The recursive system based on the BTC main chain can automatically adjust the number of extension layers according to the degree of network congestion.
Secure and traceable: All transactions conducted on the Fractal network can ultimately be traced back to the Bitcoin main chain.
How does Fractal achieve this goal of maintaining the legitimacy of the main network while improving processing efficiency in multiple aspects?
Multi-layer expansion mechanism
Fractal uses the clever design of recursive expansion layers to increase the throughput of BTC transactions. Multiple levels of expansion layers are created on top of the BTC main chain to form a tree-like recursive structure. This structure allows a "fork mode" in which each layer can be further expanded, increasing the parallel processing capacity of the entire network.
When the transaction volume on the main chain increases, Fractal will automatically divert some of the transactions to the upper layer. Each layer can process transactions independently, and the number of expansion layers can be dynamically increased or decreased according to network demand. During peak periods, it can quickly create new layers to cope with sudden increases in transaction volume. This dynamic expansion capability allows the network to flexibly respond to different load conditions.
Cadence Mining
Fractal uses the same PoW consensus mechanism as Bitcoin. BTC miners can seamlessly switch to Fractal block mining with current ASICs, GPUs, and other existing hardware.
In order to expand the diversity of users participating in mining, Fractal proposed a merged mining mechanism, Cadence Mining, which combines the two mining modes of permissionless mining and merged mining. Every 3 blocks is a cycle, of which 2 blocks are generated through "permissionless mining" and 1 block is generated through "merge mining".
For ease of understanding, here is a brief explanation of the two mining methods: "Permissionless mining" allows anyone with the right tools and hardware to mine Fractal blocks, similar to the mining method of BTC; while "merged mining" is specifically for BTC miners, allowing miners to mine BTC blocks and Fractal blocks at the same time without taking up additional computing power.
Reapply OP_CAT
Fractal Bitcoin reapplies OP_CAT, an opcode that existed in early versions of BTC but was later disabled. OP_CAT allows two strings to be concatenated together. A script using OP_CAT can expand a 1-byte value to more than 1 TB of data. This ability to generate huge data may be used by attackers to conduct DoS attacks, causing node crashes or network congestion. Since there was no effective restriction mechanism for the aggressiveness of OP_CAT in early versions, OP_CAT was disabled until Tapscript effectively solved this problem by limiting the size of stack elements to 520 bytes.
Today, the “purified” OP_CAT opcode has become a powerful tool for developers, making it easier for them to handle large integers and enhance BTC’s scripting capabilities.
Furthermore, re-using OP_CAT will bring more development possibilities to the BTC ecosystem, and more diverse on-chain adoption possibilities such as on-chain applications and smart contracts will be able to take root in the BTC main chain.
summary
Currently, Fractal has officially opened the water collection channel and test page, but perhaps because the army of scooping up coins is too enthusiastic, the faucet page has been overwhelmed and keeps reporting errors, so water cannot be collected for the time being. The test coins will be refreshed and reset at 16:00 Beijing time on August 13, and will be officially launched on the test network afterwards, so readers who want to participate don’t have to be too anxious.
Returning to the project itself, whether from the perspective of the project concept or the implementation mechanism, it seems that Fractal, which has always insisted on "orthodox expansion" based on the BTC main chain, has indeed used creative mechanisms to achieve the native expansion of BTC. The future widespread adoption, long-term verification of security, and integration and improvement with the existing BTC ecosystem all require continuous self-iteration and continuous time testing. I hope Fractal can remain consistent and keep going in the impetuous crypto world.
