- Fractal Bitcoin blends proof of work and merged mining, accelerating block times.
- The launch was marked by a contentious 50% premine, sparking widespread discussion.
- Borrows core features from Bitcoin, setting a total supply limit of 210 million.
Fractal Bitcoin has officially activated its mainnet, unveiling a version that heavily borrows from Bitcoin Core v24.0.1. The announcement came through a social media post by @mononautical, a developer in the memepool community. This new blockchain integrates familiar elements from other projects like namecoin and bcash but introduces significant tweaks in its consensus mechanism.
The primary alterations in Fractal Bitcoin include a combination of standard proof of work and merged mining blocks. It boasts a rapid 30-second target block time and features a continuous difficulty adjustment mechanism directly lifted from bcash. Its tokenomics reveal a striking difference: a maximum supply cap of 210 million tokens, with an initial block reward set at 25 tokens. These rewards will see a halving every 2.1 million blocks.
Premine Sparks Market Debate
The most controversial aspect of this launch is the substantial premine. Initially, the founders made 50% of the total token supply fully spendable. This immediate availability starkly contrasts with the gradual earnings miners will accumulate over two years—the length of a halving period for Fractal Bitcoin.
BTC Dominance Peaks: Does It Mark the End of Bear Market?Further scrutiny of the project’s litepaper reveals an ambitious yet vague use of technical jargon. Terms like “virtualization,” “recursive scaling,” and “layered approaches” pepper the document, yet the practical deployment shows little alignment with these concepts. Critics, including @mononautical, have labeled the project as just another “shitfork” of Bitcoin, suggesting it offers minimal innovation or real-world application.
Critics Challenge Technical Claims
Token distribution beyond the hefty premine includes 15% allocated to an ecosystem treasury and another 10% reserved for community grants. Smaller portions of the supply are earmarked for presales and consultants, each receiving 5%. Core contributors are allocated 15% of the total tokens, with specific caps set on annual distributions to ensure a controlled release over a decade.
The setup of Fractal Bitcoin underscores a trend in the crypto space: New chains often mimic established protocols with minor tweaks, focusing more on market capture than technological innovation. As the community reacts to these developments, the actual utility and acceptance of Fractal Bitcoin remain to be seen.
