Bitcoin News: Fractal Bitcoin Mainnet Launches with Premine Controversy and Code Tweaks

In the latest development, Fractal Bitcoin announced the launch of its mainnet while sparking immediate debate over the project’s design choices and transparency. As per the early indicator, the new blockchain is a clone of the Bitcoin Core v24.0.1, aka the Bitcoin mainnet, that comes with some tweaks along with a borrowed code from Bitcoin Cash and Namecoin.

Fractal Bitcoin Launches A Clone of Bitcoin Core

The Fractal BTC network includes a mix of standard Proof-of-Work (PoW) and merge-mined blocks. Additionally, it also has a 30-second target block time and continuous difficulty adjusting while copying the code from the 30-second target block time.

The Fractal Bitcoin blockchain comes with a maximum supply of 210 million coins, with an initial block reward of 25 coins per block and a halving every 2.1 million blocks. Additionally, they have also activated the OP_CAT opcode.

The blockchain seeks to adopt a multi-layer architecture with the goal of solving congestion issues while preserving the integrity of the Bitcoin PoW protocol. Developed by the Unisat wallet team, this blockchain is basically a sidechain. With its merged mining mechanism also called Cadence mining, the Fractal Bitcoin platform aims to disrupt the BTC ecosystem.

Cadence Mining allows BTC miners to participate in the Fractal Network every three blocks. This method helps to optimize the resources while ensuring the security of the Bitcoin mainnet. Interestingly, this launch comes in September as the broader crypto market faces a huge sell-off.

Controversies Surrounding Premine

Controversy has erupted over the network’s hefty 50% premine, which is immediately spendable. This premine accounts for half of the fully diluted supply of Fractal Bitcoin. This means that miners will need two years, which is an entire halving cycle, to mine the same amount awarded to the founders on day one.

While the Fractal litepaper touts ambitious goals related to “virtualization” and “recursive scaling in layers,” the actual implementation has drawn criticism for bearing little resemblance to these promises.

Some industry observers have labeled it as yet another “shitfork” with minimal innovation, along with questionable premine and cloned features.

Fractal seeks to become the ideal solution for applications that require high throughput such as BRC20 tokens, Ordinals, or even NFTs. The Bitcoin price has recently come under strong selling pressure following the US jobs data last week.

As of press time, the BTC price is trading at $54,816 levels with a market cap of $1.082 trillion.