Is Fractal's FSIC and ASIC what we are buying: "computing power" or "attention"?

Author: Cookie, BlockBeats

There is less than a week left until the Fractal mainnet goes live on September 9. From the very beginning, everyone has been wondering whether the "new asset frenzy" of last year's inscriptions can be replicated on Fractal, but attention has now shifted to two other points. The first is the "mining" of "head start mining," and the second is the new infrastructure related to OP_CAT.

Since the latter will take some time to materialize after the mainnet launch, it can be said that the biggest and most direct hot topic currently related to Fractal is "mining." Among the NFT projects related to "mining," the ones with the highest attention are FSIC and ASIC.

Both projects started off with a rather pessimistic sales pace, but eventually accelerated suddenly until completion. Let's take a look at FSIC first.

The sale price of FSIC is 0.0048 Bitcoin, with a total supply of 3,800. After minting began on August 29, it continued until the final public sale phase to complete all sales.

In the early stages, this project faced a lot of skepticism, such as the team remaining anonymous and only having a photo of a mining machine with the word "FSIC."

Additionally, there were questions about whether FSIC's price was too high compared to renting equivalent hash power.

However, the reason I minted 2 FSICs at that time was precisely because the project faced too much skepticism. Before the sale, FSIC had already responded to the doubts, and most importantly, clarified that its hash power source was a one-year lease from the Solo Fractal mining pool. As long as this project doesn't run away after the sale and actually focuses on hash power, this type of "mining" NFT will have its advantages:

Hash power leasing has a certain understanding and operational threshold for general players, such as how to buy it cost-effectively and who to buy from, etc. Some leases even have consumption thresholds, requiring a minimum amount of hash power to lease.

Leasing hash power is more like "one-way bullish on $FB," especially as the "mining" craze heats up, the price of hash power leasing will also increase, but it effectively means "being locked up" and unable to realize profits in real-time. On the other hand, NFTs that can be traded on the secondary market, although the hash power of a single NFT may not be high, the extra price can be seen as a form of "liquidity premium," allowing you to sell your hash power to other players at any time.

Therefore, the essence of "mining" NFTs is more like "attention investment," rather than how much can actually be mined; the key is that the team doesn't run away with the money and that buying and selling can happen at any time.

Because FSIC reached a floor price of 0.01 Bitcoin after all sales, doubling from the minting price, ASIC also began to accelerate when there were still over 1,000 left, ultimately completing the sale of all 3,150 "mining" NFTs at a price of 0.0062 Bitcoin. The differences between this project and FSIC are:

• $FB mining will not start until a week after the Fractal mainnet officially launches, while FSIC will start from the first day of the mainnet launch. Since they are genuinely purchasing mining machines, deploying new machines takes time.
• The average hash power of a single ASIC NFT will reach 17 TH/s, while FSIC is 7 TH/s.
• The ASIC team is real-name verified, while the FSIC team is anonymous.

The important points of contention lie in the first two points. Although the average hash power of a single ASIC NFT is more than twice that of FSIC, mining will start a week later than FSIC, and that first week is crucial. Currently, we cannot see how the market will react to these two differences in price, as ASIC will only launch its entire collection on Magic Eden tomorrow. However, the floor price of FSIC on Magic Eden has remained stable around 0.007 Bitcoin, still higher than ASIC's minting price. Therefore, I am cautiously optimistic that ASIC's minters will be able to make a profit at the start, but whether the advantage in hash power will fully translate into price remains to be observed.