The hot and highly anticipated Bitcoin Scale Network went live this week, although its code is indistinguishable from Bitcoin's own Layer-1 blockchain. What does it give?
On Sunday, Fractal Bitcoin announced the mainnet launch of its Bitcoin sidechain network. As a tribute, Fractal included in the Genesis Block the same message embedded in Bitcoin's first block regarding bank loans – by anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Despite a rocky start in terms of some of its blockchain features, blockchain has now begun its mission to “natively grow Bitcoin” in a secure manner.
“Fractal Bitcoin is the only Bitcoin scaling solution that uses the Bitcoin Core code itself to continuously scale unlimited layers on top of the world's most secure blockchain,” reads Fractal's website.
Unlike other benchmarks, Fractal says it expects “self-replicating consistency” with the Bitcoin consensus. That means all Fractal transactions and hashes can be traced back to their source on Bitcoin's main blockchain.
What's more, the fact that Sun's code remains highly compatible with the Layer-1 chain allows most infrastructure (including wallets, token levels, and virtual queues) to be easily compatible with Fractal. One of the main contributors to the project is UniSat, a Bitcoin text service and marketplace whose team already provides Fractal with infrastructure support.
However, there are a few key differences between Bitcoin and Fractal: The latter uses 30 second block times, meaning transactions are settled about 20 times faster. Also, unlimited Fractal layers can be built on top of other fractals, with transaction potential increasing 20X with each layer.
“Interaction on the chain can scale up and down as demand changes – acting as a flexible ‘blockspace load balancer' and reducing congestion at any particular layer,” the website explains.
It also has a unique consensus mechanism known as “cadence mining”. Two of the three blocks on the fractal are for the gas currency FB. Half of the FB tokens were pre-mined and distributed to early ecosystem participants, raising concerns among some members of the Bitcoin community.
Every third Fractal block integrates with Bitcoin L1, tapping Bitcoin's unrivaled proof-of-work security.
Finally, Fractal comes with an activation of OP_CAT, an old Bitcoin opcode that many devs are campaigning to return to Bitcoin L1. This enables a variety of applications on Fractal, including easy-to-build ZK coils, hailed in the crypto space as a leading solution for scaling blockchain and adding new programming capabilities to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Virtual Machine—a so-called Bitcoin “rollups-as-a-service” provider—plans to deploy its infrastructure on Fractal this month.
“We're bringing EVM to Fractal,” BVM tweeted last week. “That means developers can migrate Solidity dapps from Ethereum to Fractal with minimal effort. Just change the endpoint.”
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