Cat20: The Final Battle of Fractal’s Token Issuance Protocol (Part 1)

Author: Ordslabs, @peter3050

The recent focus of the Fracatl ecosystem is the Cat20 protocol, which may have two superficial reasons for causing FOMO:

1. This is a new coin issuance protocol based on OP_CAT, which is in line with the emotional characteristics of the Web3 industry of "playing with new things instead of old things";

2. Fractal's official support has further aroused market imagination.

After many discussions in the space between us and the @scryptplatform team (the Cat protocol was developed by an anonymous team based on the scrypt platform), we have come to a vague conclusion that even if we put aside the above emotional factors, the technical characteristics of Cat20 will bring it huge development space.

1. Chaotic protocol dispute

Before explaining this conclusion, let’s go back to the problem faced by the BTC ecosystem coin issuance protocol: there are too many protocols, and the advantages of each protocol are not obvious, resulting in no one being able to convince anyone. The final result is that liquidity and consensus are becoming increasingly decentralized.

It can be said that there is no winner in the current BTC ecosystem coin issuance protocol dispute, and the entire ecosystem is a loser. As the most basic element of the ecosystem, the standards of assets are not unified, which makes it difficult to support subsequent applications, and thus it is difficult to create a significant wealth effect (assets in the BTC ecosystem can hardly maintain a market value of more than 1 billion, which is extremely inconsistent with the scale of BTC). Without a significant wealth effect, it is difficult to attract external users and institutional funds to enter, resulting in a long-term PVP (player vs. player) situation within the ecosystem.

2. Cat20: Fractal's "chosen one"

Fractal maintained a lot of consistency with BTC at the beginning of its design, but there were also some obvious differences, such as faster block generation (increased by 20 times) and larger blocks. These changes will also have a significant impact on the coin issuance protocol. For example, in the scenario of BRC20, due to the 10-minute block time of the first layer, a large number of users have enough time to participate and form a larger consensus.

But on Fractal, the fast block generation time makes the whole process almost instantaneous. In addition to script masters who can quickly obtain chips, a large number of retail investors simply do not have enough time to enter the market. As @0xquqi said, in the end, there were not enough groups to pull 500 people. In order to increase consensus, a simple way is to greatly expand the number of assets and give more people time to get on board, but this will lead to the problem of excessive number of assets and reduced scarcity, which is contrary to value.

How to issue assets on Fractal, so as to avoid excessive number and ensure enough time for more people to participate, so as to generate stronger consensus? Cat20 seems to be able to solve this problem.

As shown in the figure, Cat20 is based on OP_CAT and has programming capabilities. It can set some pre-rules in the mint process, so that the mint process can last for a certain period of time or cover a wider range of people. Moreover, the scrypt team confirmed that these rules can form customized templates, and there may be tools in the future to facilitate the project party to set the required rules.

The ideal coin issuance process may be like the process of BTC mining: difficulty, low threshold.

1. Difficult: Rules are set during the minting process (such as the cryptographic puzzle of BTC) so that everyone needs a certain amount of time to mint, and the probability of everyone's minting success is close to the same.

2. Low threshold: Ordinary users can also participate in minting, just like participating in BTC mining through mining pools. In the future, with the improvement of Cat20 infrastructure, it is entirely possible to create a "difficult, low threshold" coin issuance process on Fractal, allowing more users to participate fairly, thereby producing a stronger consensus in the first step.

Therefore, the programmability and other characteristics of Cat20 are expected to become the most suitable coin issuance protocol in the Fractal environment.

The first half of this article mainly explains that Cat20 is likely to become the most successful coin issuance protocol on Fractal. In the second half, we will discuss whether Cat20 is likely to unify the various protocols of the BTC ecosystem, end the chaotic dispute over protocols, and lead the industry into the next stage. Please stay tuned.