More despairing than the bloodbath of altcoins is the question of whether this industry will improve. The continuous decline of VC coins, the speculative nature of MEME coins, criticized centralized exchanges, unexpected interest rate cuts, and the imminent announcement of the U.S. presidential election... A sense of confusion and uncertainty looms over every crypto player.

"You can see how far into the future you can look from how far back in history you can look." Let's try to go back to the last moment of confusion and uncertainty, whether following a map or seeking a sword, to cook up a bowl of chicken soup called 'WAGMI.'

We All Gonna Make It, we will eventually win.

01 Anxiety and confusion in Western time.

Are you regretting missing out on AI meme tokens that could have had hundredfold or thousandfold gains? Staring at $GOAT, $GNON, $SLOP for a while not clear on what's happening? Are you pondering over the smart contract of $NEIRO and the spot price of $neiro on Binance, trying to quickly locate CTO (Community Take Over) and other similar themed tokens to purchase?

Going back six months, $BOME, $SLERF, and the narrative surrounding the Trump shooting incident tokens like $FIGHT, and Musk's Mars city concept tokens $TERMINUS, $MARS, explaining the stories behind these tokens isn't an easy task, not to mention that @pumpdotfun has already issued over 2 million meme tokens since the beginning of this year (source: Cryptohunt.ai).

Relax, this kind of 'chaotic moment' that causes anxiety is a characteristic of the 'western time.' As early as 2023, PEPE emerged and its market cap exceeded 1 billion dollars within three weeks. Tokens with the characteristics of 'novel storytelling + large capital ramping up + rapid listing + continuous development' created by western players are emerging in large numbers, but the final development (taking over) process is handed over to eastern players.

When will there be a narrative led by eastern players, so that they can work together to ramp up and let foreigners take over? After experiencing the anxious and confusing western time, users are eager to enter a time belonging to the East.

"Only eastern players like to carve things on stones." Zhu Su, founder of the first three arrows capital, who ended four months of imprisonment, evaluated the inscription casting in a Space session.

At that time, the gas on BTC was continuously rising due to the wealth effect of $ORDI, and people (mostly Asia players) were crazy about casting various four-character BRC20 tokens, claiming that this would become the universal token protocol for the next bull market: It's time to migrate applications from Ethereum to Bitcoin!

A novel narrative has once again emerged, followed by capital ramping up, rapid listing, and continuous development.

During this period, @MerlinLayer2 @BSquaredNetwork @BitlayerLabs @build_on_bob and other BTC public chains successively announced financing, @babylonlabs_io @SolvProtocol @IgnitionFBTC brought more gameplay such as staking to the BTC ecosystem.

On September 24, 2023, the production progress of the ninth inscription on BTC $SATS successfully reached 100%, with a total of 21,107,258 castings and 36,061 holders.

On October 10, 2023, UniSat officially announced that BRC20-swap will be launched on the 25th, and indicated that it will use $SATS as the trading fee, causing $SATS to surge by 10 times.

On November 7, 2023, Binance announced the launch of $ORDI, which is considered a significant move in Binance's entry into the BTC ecosystem. By that time, OKX had already launched $ORDI as early as May, leveraging Inscriptions to achieve rapid growth of Web3 wallets.

Although Coinbase listed $ORDI in April of 24, considering the influence of Binance on users in the East and the West, the time when they listed $ORDI can be seen as entering the "continual construction" phase. This time, it's just taken over by Western users.

From the November when Binance listed $ORDI to April next year when Coinbase listed $ORDI, the development of the BTC ecosystem was not smooth sailing, with major events including:

On December 6, Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr expressed that 'Inscriptions' were sending garbage information to the blockchain using a vulnerability in the Bitcoin Core client.

Subsequently, the United States National Vulnerability Database (NVD) on December 9 marked Bitcoin Inscriptions as a cybersecurity risk, calling for attention to security vulnerabilities developed by Ordinals Protocol in 2022.

Amid the ongoing debate with BTC OG, the inscription finds itself in a dilemma that may disappear with client updates. Discussions around the inscription fork have become a new hot topic, during which assets like BRC100 and ARC20 have performed well.

In the midst of the debate, Bitcoin Ordinals founder Casey released the highly anticipated Runes document in March, allowing Bitcoin transactions to erode, mint, and transfer native digital commodities. Casey even confidently stated that if the market cap of runes fails to exceed 1 billion USD, he will "commit seppuku" live.

On April 19, 2024, $MERL was listed on OKX, leading to a steady decline. By November, $MERL had dropped from a high of 1.74U to 0.25U, with a market cap still over 0.5 billion. $MERL's decline raised questions about the profit-making effect of the BTC ecosystem, and subsequently, several BTC ecosystem projects found themselves in the awkward situation of "delayed issuance."

$MERL's issuance can be seen as the end of Eastern time. Prior to this, $ORDI hit an ATH of 96U in March, while $SATS, despite falling since its listing on Binance in December 2023, rebounded close to its historical high in March. Everything returned to calm in April, with no more waves caused by inscriptions, as the market moved out of the less than half-year Eastern time, heading towards meme narratives on SOL, entering Western time.

Looking back at the first rise and fall east to west, the decline of the inscription had early signs.

The narrative of the inscription itself, to some extent, hitched a ride on the narratives of "BTC ETF approval" and "lack of innovation in ETH," with people discovering the interesting side of BTC amidst boredom, and the inscription's "no reservations, no VC, grabbable forging" catering to the market's resistance towards VC coins.

In this process, the support of Unisat and OKX in infrastructure is essential, allowing users to experience the bulk casting of inscriptions at the front end and participate in the hot NFT project auctions.

However, the wealth effect of inscriptions is based on the scarcity of liquidity. When inscriptions are listed on exchanges, they to some extent lose the halo of BTC ecosystem attributes and become common tokens in the secondary market. As time progresses, the slow update of infrastructure makes users realize that the BTC ecosystem is nothing but an 'old wine in a new bottle', while the decline of tokens accelerates the end of the narrative.

Fractal Bitcoin is a Bitcoin expansion solution created by the well-known Bitcoin wallet team, Unisat.

According to the official documentation, Fractal Bitcoin aims to improve transaction processing capability and speed on the BTC main chain by recursively creating infinite expansion layers using the BTC core code, while maintaining full compatibility with the existing Bitcoin ecosystem. It features fast transaction speed, native compatibility, dynamic adjustments, and more.

During the first Oriental Time, the life and death of inscriptions were controlled by a few BTC core developers. Unisat clearly realized that the structures in such uncertain events are all bubbles, so they chose to create a brand new BTC public chain. This not only allows them to control their destiny but also reduces the high fees on the BTC mainnet.

Fractal Bitcoin is developed based on the BTC core code, fully compatible with existing Bitcoin wallets, tools, and mining equipment. It has shown good performance in terms of network capacity and transaction traceability after going live.

Fractal adopts the same PoW mechanism as bitcoin, allowing BTC miners to seamlessly switch to Fractal mining with existing hardware. Through the Cadence Mining mechanism, combining permissionless mining and pool mining, 2 out of every 3 blocks are generated through permissionless mining, and 1 through pool mining. Permissionless mining allows anyone to participate, while pool mining enables BTC miners to mine both types of blocks simultaneously without additional computational power.

Currently, Fractal's pool mining computational power is 352.278 EH/s, while bitcoin is approximately 570.96 EH/s during the same period, accounting for 61.9%. In other words, Fractal maintains network security by providing miners with a certain amount of $FB daily.

1. CAT20 Protocol

CAT20 is an early protocol in the Fractal network. According to the official documentation by @ProtocolCAT, the CAT Protocol is a new bitcoin-based token protocol based on UTXO, short for Covenant Attested Token (CAT). The protocol is validated by miners and uses smart contracts to manage token minting and transfers. It has the following features:

• - No need for indexers: The token's rule set is guaranteed by the bitcoin consensus, inheriting BTC's security. Its data and logic reside on-chain, without relying on any off-chain third parties (e.g., indexers) to operate.

• - Modular: CAT tokens can be used in other smart contracts to build more complex decentralized applications (e.g., AMM, lending, staking, etc.).

• Programmable minting: The token minting rules are executed by smart contracts to avoid excessive minting.

• Cross-chain interoperability: The CAT protocol allows multi-chain assets, enabling decentralized applications to run across chains.

• SPV compatibility: CAT tokens support Simplified Payment Verification (SPV). Light clients like mobile phones can independently verify the authenticity of tokens without trusting a central server.

The CAT protocol supports both homogeneous tokens (referred to as CAT20 standard) and non-homogeneous tokens (referred to as CAT721 standard), currently:

The first CAT20 token saw gas during the minting process spike from 150 sats/vB to 5000 sats/vB, with a maximum of 10U per card (5 per card), now dropped to 3.5U.

The total quantity of the first CAT721 NFTs is 10,000, with 1500 provided for an OKX wallet lottery, and 8500 for users staking 100 CAT20 tokens in their wallets.

Unisat has shown very high support for CAT20, launching a query page during the CAT20 minting period and providing support for CAT20 assets in the current website and wallet.

2.PizzaSwap

PizzaSwap, formerly known as Fractal Swap developed by Unisat, is a key product in Unisat's roadmap for the first time in the Asian timezone.

PizzaSwap currently has no tokens. Unisat airdropped the five-character Brc20 $PIZZA to ecological users in May this year, and has always positioned it as a giveaway. However, this name obviously triggered speculations among users that it could be the governance token of PizzaSwap, causing it to rise to 6U before its launch in September, and now falling back to around 2U.

On October 27, Unisat announced on its official channel that PizzaSwap will kick off the LPfest on November 6, where users can earn transaction fees and $FB rewards by adding liquidity on PizzaSwap.

As the gas token of Fractal, the price of $FB dropped from a peak of 38U since its launch to around 5U, with a current circulating market cap of only 25 million, even less than the market cap of most short-lived inscriptions last year. There are many reasons behind this, mainly related to the current circulation situation of $FB.

The airdrop share of $FB is not large. The main way of producing $FB is through joint mining by miners, which is why some users criticize the selling pressure every day. On the other hand, due to the relatively low circulation of $FB, it does not fully meet the listing requirements of some exchanges, so users have limited ways to obtain $FB. Lastly, the low circulation of $FB will be significantly affected by the development of on-chain ecosystem and wealth effects. When projects appear on-chain, users rush to buy $FB, while Fractal, apart from the brief popularity after the launch of inscriptions, later symbols and others are not as expected, and on-chain gas has dropped to single digits.

However, for a development team like Unisat, which has crossed the ups and downs of inscriptions, perhaps they have other plans.

In fact, the time difference between the East and the West is not contradictory, as capital never sleeps, the only difference is making money in different time zones.

When people get tired of discussing MEME on the beaches of California, they will also choose to shift their focus to Brc20 tokens on the other side of the ocean. Essentially, it is still the need for funds to be conveyed through narratives in the context of liquidity shortage.

However, after each narrative, developers with real technical expertise and a sense of responsibility will carefully lay the foundation and patiently wait for the clock to turn to their own time zone.

On October 30, 2023, UniSat officially announced the 14 assets supported in the initial stage of BRC20-swap, including $SATS;

On November 1, 2023, BRC20-swap was officially launched, with nearly half of the 118 pools designating $SATS as liquidity assets;

In December 2023, UniSat announced the opening of the indexer mining operation in January 2024, allowing users to earn $SATS rewards by running transaction packaging services.

Looking back on the relationship between Unisat and $SATS, $SATS was just a 'smart' Meme coin at its inception, but after receiving UniSat's support, $SATS began its own narrative. Now, the Fractal network has become the focus of Unisat in the next period. Will we witness the outbreak of CAT20 in December if we seek the sword at this moment?

Let us wait and see, once again, stepping into the time of Eastern narratives.