More despairing than the bloodbath of altcoins is the question: will this industry improve? With the continuous decline of VC coins, the meme coins fighting on the chain, criticized centralized exchanges, lower-than-expected rate cuts, the upcoming results of the US presidential election... Confusion and uncertainty shroud every crypto player.

"The longer you can look back in history, the farther you can look into the future." Let's try to go back to the last period of confusion and uncertainty, whether to follow old ways or try new strategies, and cook up a pot of chicken soup named 'WAGMI'.

We All Gonna Make It, we will eventually win.

The anxious and confused Western time of 01.

Are you regretting missing out on AI meme tokens multiplying by hundreds or thousands? Staring at $GOAT $GNON $SLOP for half a day not understanding what's going on? Are you pondering over the futures contract of $NEIRO and the spot price of $neiro on Binance, trying to quickly find CTO (Community Take Over) and similar themed tokens to buy?

Moving back six months, explaining the narratives behind tokens like $BOME $SLERF as well as $FIGHT emerging around the Trump shooting event, the $TERMINUS $MARS concept of Musk's city on Mars is no easy task, not to mention the fact that @pumpdotfun has issued over 2 million types of Meme tokens since the beginning of this year (source: Cryptohunt.ai).

Relaxing, such an anxious 'disordered time' is a characteristic of 'Western time'. As early as 2023, PEPE emerged and within three weeks, the market cap exceeded $1 billion. These tokens created by Western players with the characteristics of 'novel narrative + large capital pulling up + rapid listing + continuous development' are emerging endlessly, but the final development (taking over) stage is handed over to Eastern players.

"When will there be a narrative led by Eastern players, pulling together to let foreigners take over?" After experiencing the anxious and confusing Western time, users are eagerly looking forward to entering a time belonging to the East.

"Only Eastern players like to carve on stones." Zhu Su, founder of the first three arrows capital released after four months of imprisonment, commented on 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 Asian players) went crazy casting various four-character BRC20s and claimed that this would become the universal token protocol for the next bull market: it's time to migrate applications on Ethereum to bitcoin!

A novel narrative emerges once again, followed by fund pulling, 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 like staking to the BTC ecosystem.

On September 24, 2023, the ninth inscription $SATS on BTC successfully reached 100% of the casting progress, 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 stated that it will use $SATS as the trading fee. $SATS responded by soaring 10 times.

On November 7, 2023, Binance announced the listing of $ORDI, considered to be an important move in Binance's entry into the BTC ecosystem. By this time, OKX had already listed $ORDI in May and achieved rapid growth in Web3 wallets with the help of inscriptions.

Although Coinbase listed $ORDI in April 24, 2024, the timing of Binance's listing of $ORDI can be seen as entering the 'continuous construction' phase based on its influence on users in the East and the West, with Western users taking the baton this time.

From Binance's listing of $ORDI in November to Coinbase's listing of $ORDI in April of the following year, the development of the BTC ecosystem was not a smooth process. The main events were:

On December 6, Luke Dashjr, a core developer of Bitcoin, stated at X that 'Inscriptions' were exploiting a vulnerability in the Bitcoin Core client to send junk information to the blockchain.

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

With the ongoing debate with BTC OG, the Inscriptions are falling into a dilemma that may disappear with client updates. The discussion around the Inscriptions fork has become a new hotspot, during which assets such as BRC100 and ARC20 have performed well.

In the midst of the debate, Bitcoin Ordinals founder Casey released the much-anticipated Runes documentation in March, allowing Bitcoin transactions to etch, cast, and transfer native digital commodities of Bitcoin. Casey even confidently stated that if the market cap of Runes fails to surpass 1 billion USD, he will "commit seppuku" live.

On April 19, 2024, $MERL launched on OKX, subsequently starting a downward trend. By November, $MERL dropped from a high of 1.74U to 0.25U, with a market cap still over 0.5 billion. The decline of $MERL raised doubts about the profitability of the BTC ecosystem, leading to several BTC ecosystem projects falling into the embarrassing situation of "postponing coin issuance."

The coin issuance of $MERL can be seen as the end of the East Asian Time. Before this, $ORDI hit an all-time high of 96U in March, while $SATS, despite falling all the way since its launch on Binance in December 2023, rebounded in March to near its historical high. Everything returned to calm in April, with the Runes no longer making waves, and the market moving out of the less than half a year's Eastern Time, heading towards meme narrative on SOL and entering Western Time.

Looking back at the first time of moving from east to west, the decline of the Inscriptions had early signs.

The narrative of the Inscriptions, to some extent, hitched a ride on the narrative fast track of "BTC ETF approval" and "ETH lack of innovation." People discovered the interesting aspects of BTC amidst boredom, while the Inscriptions' "no reserve, no VC, grabbable forging" catered to the market's aversion to VC coins.

In this process, the support of Unisat and OKX in infrastructure is indispensable, allowing users to experience the mass casting of inscriptions on the front end, and participate in the hot NFT projects' purchases.

However, the wealth effect of inscriptions is based on the scarcity of liquidity. When the inscriptions are listed on exchanges, they to some extent lose the halo of Bitcoin's ecological attributes and become common tokens in the secondary market. As time goes on, the slow update of infrastructure makes users realize that the Bitcoin ecosystem is nothing but "old wine in a new bottle", and 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 official documents, Fractal Bitcoin improves transaction processing capacity and speed by recursively creating infinite expansion layers on the BTC main chain using BTC core code, while maintaining full compatibility with the existing Bitcoin ecosystem. It features fast transaction speed, native compatibility, dynamic adjustment, etc.

In the first Oriental Time, the life and death of inscriptions were controlled by a few BTC core developers. Unisat evidently realized that constructions on such an uncertain event are all bubbles, so they chose to create a brand new BTC public chain, not only to control their own destiny but also to reduce the high fees on the BTC mainnet.

Fractal Bitcoin, developed based on BTC core code, is fully compatible with existing Bitcoin wallets, tools, and mining equipment, and has performed well in terms of network capacity and transaction traceability after its launch.

Fractal uses 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 pooled mining, 2 out of every 3 blocks are generated using permissionless mining, and 1 is generated using pooled mining. Permissionless mining allows anyone to participate, while pooled mining allows BTC miners to mine both types of blocks without additional computational power.

Currently, Fractal's pooled mining hash rate is 352.278 EH/s, while Bitcoin is around 570.96 EH/s during the same period, accounting for 61.9%. In other words, Fractal ensures network security by offering miners a certain amount of $FB daily.

1. CAT20 protocol

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

• No need for indexers: The token rule set is ensured by the bitcoin consensus, inheriting the security of BTC. Its data and logic reside on-chain, without relying on any off-chain third parties (such as 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 casting: Token casting rules are executed by smart contracts to avoid excessive casting.

• Cross-chain interoperability: CAT protocol allows assets from multiple chains, enabling decentralized applications to operate across chains.

• SPV compatible: 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 fungible tokens (referred to as CAT20 standard) and non-fungible tokens (referred to as CAT721 standard) currently:

The first CAT20 token saw gas during the minting process surge from 150 sats/vB to 5000 sats/vB, with a single CAT20 (5 as one unit) reaching a high of 10U, now dropped to 3.5U.

The total supply of the first CAT721 NFT is 10,000, with 1,500 offered for OKX wallet lottery and 8,500 provided to users staking 100 CAT20 tokens in their wallets.

Unisat has shown great support for CAT20, launching a query page during the CAT20 minting period and now providing support for CAT20 assets in both its current website and wallet.

2.PizzaSwap

PizzaSwap, previously Unisat's Fractal Swap, is a key product in Unisat's roadmap for the first time in Asia time.

PizzaSwap currently does not have a token. Unisat airdropped a five-character Brc20 $PIZZA to ecological users in May this year, positioning it as a giveaway. However, this name clearly sparked speculation among users that it might be PizzaSwap's governance token, causing a surge to 6U when it is scheduled to go online in September, now falling back to around 2U.

On October 27th, Unisat announced on its official channel that PizzaSwap will launch LPfest on November 6th, where users can earn trading fees and $FB rewards by adding liquidity to PizzaSwap.

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

The airdrop share of $FB is not large, and the main way to obtain it is through cooperative mining by miners, hence it is criticized by some users for daily sell pressure; On the other hand, due to the relatively small circulation ratio of $FB, it does not fully meet the listing requirements of some exchanges, so the channels for users to obtain $FB are limited; Finally, the low circulation of $FB will be significantly influenced by the development of on-chain ecology and wealth effects. When projects appear on the chain, users rush to buy $FB, while Fractal, apart from a brief popularity after the inscription went online, fell short of expectations in later runes, with on-chain gas dropping to single digits.

But for a development team like Unisat that transcends 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 are tired of talking about MEME on the beaches of California, they will also choose to shift their focus to BRC20 tokens on the other side of the ocean. Fundamentally, it is still the narrative that needs to be completed to convey in the context of liquidity shortage.

But after each narrative, developers with real technical strength and a sense of responsibility will conscientiously lay the groundwork and patiently wait for the clock to turn to their 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 that the Indexer mining operation will be open in January 2024, allowing users to earn $SATS rewards by running the transaction packaging service.

Looking back at the relationship between Unisat and $SATS, $SATS was originally just a 'wise' Meme coin at its inception, but after receiving UniSat's support, $SATS began its own narrative. Fractal Network has now become the focus of Unisat in the next period, will we see the outbreak of CAT20 in December if seeking swords at this moment?

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