UniSat's next support, will CAT20 become the new favorite of the Fractal Bitcoin ecosystem?

Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

Since the launch of the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet, hot projects have surged like a tide, one after another. The so-called first token protocol FLUX has not yet been digested, and yesterday a new token protocol called CAT Protocol stole the spotlight.

The first token of CAT Protocol, CAT, has a total supply of 21 million, with 5 per card, totaling 4.2 million cards; the current minting progress is about 35%, and it will take about 2 more days to complete minting at the current rate. As the excitement grows, the Fractal Bitcoin network fee has skyrocketed from 100 to over 1500.

Why has CAT caused such FOMO among players, and is it worth participating? Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce the characteristics of CAT Protocol, reasons for its explosive popularity, proxy websites, and participation costs in this article, hoping to be helpful to readers.

Well-Designed Token Standards

CAT Protocol consists of two parts: a fungible token standard CAT 20 and a non-fungible token standard CAT 721. Currently, only CAT 20 has been released in the official documentation. A careful reading of the technical documentation for CAT 20 reveals that the token design of CAT Protocol is relatively complete from deployment to minting logic. Here is a brief summary of the characteristics of CAT 20 tokens:

• The token name of CAT 20 is not unique. Similar to ERC 20, anyone can deploy tokens with the same name/symbol, so there will be no situation like BRC 20 and Rune where "token vanity numbers" are contested;
• Uses contracts to manage token minting and transfers. When spending UTXO to mint new tokens, new Minter UTXOs are generated, which can be used to recursively mint more tokens. Although UTXOs will merge, the token quantity will be retained. Therefore, the phenomenon widely circulated in the community about burning CAT assets due to using UTXOs containing assets in minting transaction inputs may not actually exist.

• The issuance and minting rules are more flexible. Unlike indexer-based protocols, CAT 20 token issuers can define any minting rules without making any changes to the underlying protocol. The rules include: supporting paid minting, restricting minting time and height, setting POW mining mechanisms, whitelist minting mechanisms, and similar staking minting rules. For more details, please refer to the official documentation.
• Supports both decentralized and centralized issuance methods. CAT 20 supports decentralized minting, similar to BRC 20, where token issuers only set parameters, and anyone can participate in minting new tokens; it also supports centralized minting, where only the token issuer can mint tokens.
• Supports features like pre-mining and token burning.

Proxy Platforms Launching One After Another

Although these features are enough to fascinate some tech enthusiasts, they still exist in the documentation, and the community is still exploring how to conduct transfers. Currently, players can only mint, and aside from setting up their own nodes, some proxy platforms are also gradually launching, as listed below:

• CoinTool: Those who used this platform for multi-chain inscriptions last year may be familiar with it. It has now launched a CAT 20 proxy tool. At that time, it mainly required users to import wallet mnemonic phrases, which carries certain risks. Interested users can test with small amounts.
• bitatom: A tool developed by independent developer ZEN, who previously created the Atomicals trading market, which has a high level of community trust. Currently, its platform can only display CAT minting progress, and the minting function is still under development, but it is believed to be online soon.
• Runetoshi: In fact, it is a paid proxy service rather than a platform. Users need to open a ticket in their Discord and send FB to them, and it charges 0.2 FB for each minting, which is relatively expensive. In fact, there are many proxy services in the community currently, and players can search for them in the community, but they should also be cautious of scam risks.

CAT 20 has only been online for 2 days, and the market's reaction speed has been quite fast. It is believed that better tools will be launched soon to reduce the participation threshold gap among players.

UniSat Support, Who is Behind CAT 20?

The CAT Protocol team remains in a "mysterious" state, with the official X account having only released one tweet and then falling silent, as if it were a stone thrown into the market, creating ripples before sinking quietly.

If the well-designed token structure of CAT 20 alone would not cause large-scale FOMO, as not everyone has the time and interest to read the documentation. The real reason for the large-scale FOMO, which has pushed minting gas to over 1500, is that UniSat updated the Fractal browser last night and added a page for CAT 20.

This silent update has been interpreted by the community as "premeditated," and there are suspicions that UniSat is the supporting team behind CAT 20. However, during the Twitter space "Ord My God" hosted by the community last night, UniSat and Fractal team member Vivian responded to this question quite ambiguously and conservatively, without clearly stating their relationship with CAT 20. "All projects building on Fractal are officially supported, and this update can be seen more as a test."

At the same time, some community members speculate that the team behind CAT Protocol is the sCrypt Official team, which has been deeply involved in the OPCAT field for a long time. The reason is that their understanding of OPCAT technology is sufficient to propose such a complete token protocol, and the style and font in the official documentation of CAT Protocol are consistent with sCrypt Official's habits.

On the left is the official documentation of CAT Protocol, and on the right is a tweet from sCrypt Official.

If the speculation is correct, the sCrypt Official team has previously received a grant of 10,000 FB from the Fractal ecosystem Season 0, proving that the two have collaborated before, making UniSat's support for CAT 20 not surprising.

In addition to CAT Protocol's CAT 20, there are currently two other CAT protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem. One is by Danny, the founder of opnet, who claims to have invented CAT 20 in August and will activate it after block 21000 of the Fractal mainnet; the other is CATNIP, a token protocol based on OP_CAT co-founded by Taproot Wizards and Udi Wertheimer, but it only supports the Bitcoin mainnet.

It seems that the token protocols driven by OPCAT have formed a "Three Kingdoms" situation. Currently, it appears that CAT Protocol, supported by UniSat, holds the advantage. CAT Protocol can run on any UTXO chain that activates OPCAT, meaning that in the future, when the Bitcoin mainnet supports OP_CAT, it can also migrate to the mainnet.

The Shovel Sellers Get Rich First

Currently, the over-the-counter buying price for CAT is 2 USDT per card (5 pieces), but transactions are scarce, possibly due to the ability to mint or difficulties in transferring. Below is a cost table for minting CAT created by the community. The current Fractal network fee level is around 1800-2000, and the cost to mint one is about 2 USDT, so there is not much profit left in minting now. However, if CAT was minted when the fee was below 200, then it has already yielded over 10 times the return.

During the Gold Rush in San Francisco, whether there was really a large amount of gold that made adventurers rich is unknown, but those who sold jeans and shovels at the mines truly made money.

In CAT 20, aside from the early minters who now have considerable returns (if they can sell), those who have made money are the players providing proxy services, deployment services, and selling FB tokens, all of which are the "shovels" needed for minting CAT.

There is no public data on proxy and deployment services, making it difficult to assess, but the trend of FB being in short supply has already reflected in the price—rising from 15 dollars before CAT minting started to 30 dollars, taking less than a day. Currently, users can trade FB in community OTC, the decentralized exchange DotSwap, and the centralized exchange CoinEx. Data shows that the current circulating supply of FB is about 1.27 million, with a circulating market cap of about 38.34 million dollars and a total market cap of 6.3 billion dollars.

How Long Can Attention Economy Last?

The so-called first Fractal token protocol, FLUX, has faded from people's sight, and off-market transactions are bleak. FLUX initially captured early traffic with the narrative of "First is first." Now, CAT 20, on one hand, has grasped the "traditional pursuit" of difficulty and thresholds in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and on the other hand, has the backing of UniSat, reigniting players' attention.

Although CAT 20 has certain advantages in design, it is essentially a product of the attention economy. But how long can this attention economy last?

In fact, many new token protocols have appeared on the Bitcoin mainnet, each with its own "innovation" and "characteristics," and have also caused FOMO off-market, but still could not escape the fate of extinction, such as huge, veda, cbrc 20, Compos Protocol (cpos), and Orddefi. Fractal may also follow the same path, and most players can only persist in gambling as before, without any skills, continuously consuming attention and chips.