The off-exchange price surged 60 times. What is the origin of FLUX, claimed to be the first token protocol of Fractal?

Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

Yesterday, the Fractal mainnet was officially launched.

While everyone was still immersed in discussions and calculations about the profits and losses of mining the FB token during the day, the FLUX protocol, claimed to be the first token protocol of Fractal, suddenly emerged in the evening. Moreover, the FLUX protocol's namesake token was minted within half an hour, with a total supply of 21 million, and the minting cost for one (1000 tokens) was 0.05 FB. (Odaily Note: The off-market price of FB is 15 USDT, making the minting cost of a single FLUX approximately 0.75 USDT.)

Although the token currently has no index or market, the off-market trading price once reached 50 USDT per token; based on the minting cost, this represents an increase of over 60 times. Such high returns have once again made the Bitcoin community lively:

• "Minting with airdropped FB at zero cost has turned the tables."
• "It's over, you've hit the next ORDI."
• "At this moment, it feels just like back then; the familiar sensation of the inscription craze has returned."

In fact, the BRC-20 tokens officially supported by Fractal will only be activated when the mainnet block height reaches 21,000—currently, the block height is 5,490, which means it will take about 5 more days to reach the designated height. Logically, related tokens should not appear before that. What exactly is the FLUX token protocol, and can it replicate the inscription craze? Odaily Planet Daily will briefly interpret the FLUX protocol in this article.

Introduction to the FLUX Protocol

The FLUX protocol claims to be the first UTXO-based native token protocol of Fractal, developed by Inscrib 3. Like BRC-20, FLUX inscriptions consist of three simple "functions": deploy, mint, and transfer; beyond that, there are no other technologies or functions. Therefore, FLUX can be simply understood as an asset issuance protocol that replicates BRC-20 on Fractal.

Currently, the FLUX protocol has no index, trading market, or official wallet. However, to facilitate users in deploying and minting assets, the official team has created a minting website where users can deploy (DEPLOY) or mint (MINT) FLUX assets.

Odaily Planet Daily has tested that whether deploying or minting assets, each operation requires a cost of 0.05 FB. However, since each operation's receiving address is a new address, it cannot yet be determined whether this 0.05 FB is used for network fees for protocol asset deployment and minting or directly goes to official revenue.

Overall, the minting website is quite rudimentary, and players find themselves in a passive position. For example, there is no way to view the currently deployable mintable assets and minting progress; if no content is filled in and the "Unisat" button is clicked directly, it will pop up a wallet payment window, leading to erroneous payments; there is also a warning at the top of the website stating "experimental, no refunds," so participating players must pay attention to the risks.

In addition to the first token FLUX deployed by the FLUX team itself, they have also forwarded tokens named HAWK and WGBA on the X platform (not excluding the possibility of team members participating), while other FLUX assets remain unknown.

Serial Entrepreneurs

The development team of the FLUX protocol, "Inscrib 3," describes itself on social media as "providing open-source and non-custodial solutions for the BTC protocol." Before developing the FLUX protocol, the team had developed several Bitcoin ecosystem-related projects.

The team primarily contributed to the Pipe protocol, for which they developed a minting platform, indexer, dedicated wallet, trading market, and mixed token standard PRC-404, among others. However, due to the decline in market enthusiasm and players for the PIPE protocol, these infrastructures are now rarely used. (Odaily Note: Pipe is a Bitcoin mainnet asset issuance protocol that emerged in October 2023, with its leading asset PIPE currently priced at 200 USDT, having reached a historical high of around 3000 USDT.)

In addition to the Pipe protocol, the team has also ventured into the rune field, having developed a launch platform called Runescription. Users can deploy the non-fungible inscriptions generated when etching each token of the Rune protocol as NFTs on this platform. The concept of rune NFTs gained some popularity for a while, but as interest waned, the platform has not seen any further development.

Inscrib 3 also collaborated in developing the Bloki protocol within the Rune protocol. The supply of the protocol's tokens in each block is determined by the block height and the number of runes etched in each block. Recently, they launched a decentralized large language model (LLM) based on the Blok protocol—Bloki AI, aimed at helping users train a censorship-resistant dataset on the Bitcoin blockchain.

In summary, Inscrib 3 can be considered a bona fide serial entrepreneur in the Bitcoin ecosystem, adept at seizing hotspots within the ecosystem. From choosing to support the Pipe protocol during the early Bitcoin asset issuance protocol wars to building in the rune field after the competitive results settled, and finally arriving at the current hottest Fractal ecosystem for asset issuance. Although the team's previous ventures did not create much of a stir, their current entrepreneurial efforts in the Fractal ecosystem have already achieved a certain level of success in terms of popularity, though it remains uncertain how long this can be sustained.

A Long-Awaited Rain?

Searching for the keyword "FLUX" on the X platform with language restrictions reveals that although the FLUX protocol is an overseas project, discussions in the Chinese community are quite active, ranging from protocol introductions and minting discussions to off-market trading groups, in contrast to the relatively sparse discussions in other language communities.

The FLUX protocol's ability to attract such significant attention is not only due to the team's rich history of entrepreneurship in the Bitcoin ecosystem (which often detracts from credibility) but also because it has preemptively met the market's demand for homogeneous tokens in the Fractal ecosystem compared to the official plans. Therefore, even if the protocol is not perfect and only supports simple minting and deployment, under the narrative of "the first Fractal token protocol" and "first is first," the market celebrates the "casino" opening early, much like a long-awaited rain.

The FLUX protocol may just be the beginning, potentially marking the Fractal ecosystem's entry into a "barbaric era" of competition for asset issuance protocols, similar to the early Bitcoin network, even in the presence of officially supported asset protocols.

In conclusion, while the traffic and attention generated by Fractal are indeed valuable, if the transition from the Bitcoin mainnet ecosystem to the Fractal ecosystem merely involves the same group of people moving from one "casino" to another, playing the same game without any innovation, it will not only become boring and fail to attract fresh blood but also will not generate significant wealth effects in the PVP within the ecosystem.