The tool for proxy mining is being launched one after another, and early miners have already made profits of over 10 times.

By Golem, Odaily Star Daily

Since the launch of the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet, hot projects have been emerging one after another. The self-proclaimed first token protocol, FLUX, has not yet been fully digested (recommended reading: "Out-of-market price surged 60 times, what is the story behind FLUX, the first token protocol of Fractal?"), 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 sheet, totaling 4.2 million sheets. Currently, the minting progress is about 35%, and at the current pace, it will take about 2 more days to complete the minting. With the increasing popularity, the network fee of Fractal Bitcoin has soared from 100 to over 1500.

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

Well-designed token standards

CAT Protocol consists of two parts, one is the homogeneous token standard CAT 20, and the other is the non-homogeneous token standard CAT 721. Currently, only CAT 20 has been introduced in the official documentation. If you carefully read the technical documentation of CAT 20, you will find that the token design of CAT Protocol is relatively complete from deployment to minting logic. Here is a brief summary of the features 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 the rush for "token nice numbers" as in BRC 20 and Rune.
• Use contracts to manage token minting and transfer. When spending UTXO to mint new tokens, new Minter UTXO will be generated, and these UTXOs can be used to recursively mint more tokens. Although UTXOs will be merged, the token quantity will be retained. Therefore, the phenomenon widely circulated in the community that minting transactions using UTXOs containing assets burn CAT assets may not actually exist.

• More flexible issuance and minting rules. Unlike index-based protocols, CAT 20 token issuers can define arbitrary minting rules without the need to make any changes to the underlying protocol. The rules include: support for paid minting, restrictions on minting time and height, setting of POW mining mechanism, whitelist minting mechanism, and similar staking minting rules. For more details, please refer to the official documentation.
• Support for 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.
• Support for pre-mining, token burning, and other functions.

Launch of proxy mining platforms

Although these features are enough to fascinate some tech enthusiasts, they still only exist in the documentation, and the community is still exploring how to transfer tokens. Currently, what players can do is only minting, and in addition to setting up their own nodes, some proxy mining platforms are also being launched one after another, as listed below:

• CoinTool: Partners who have been familiar with multi-chain inscriptions from last year may be familiar with this platform, which has now also launched CAT 20 proxy mining tools. At that time, it mainly required users to import wallet mnemonics, which had a certain level of risk. Interested users can use small addresses for testing.
• bitatom: An independently developed tool by ZEN, who previously independently developed the Atomicals trading market, with a relatively high level of community trust. Currently, its platform can only display CAT minting progress, and the minting function is still under development, and it is believed that it will be launched soon.
• Runetoshi: In fact, it is a proxy mining fee service, not a platform. Users need to open a ticket in its Discord and send FB to it, and each minting incurs a fee of 0.2 FB, which is relatively expensive. In fact, there are many proxy mining services in the community, and players can find them on their own in the community, but they should also be aware of the risk of fraud.

CAT 20 has only been online for 2 days, and the market's response 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 team behind CAT Protocol is still maintaining a "mysterious" status. The official X account has only released one tweet and then remained silent, as if it were a stone thrown into the market, causing ripples and then silently sinking.

If it were only because of the well-designed CAT 20 token, it would not cause a large-scale FOMO, after all, not everyone has the time and interest to read the documentation. The real reason for the large-scale FOMO that raised the minting Gas to over 1500 is that UniSat updated the Fractal browser last night and added the CAT 20 page.

This silent update has been interpreted by the community as "premeditated," and there is suspicion that UniSat is the support team behind CAT 20. However, in the Twitter space "Ord My God" held by the community last night, UniSat and Fractal team member Vivian's response to this question was also quite ambiguous and conservative, and did not clearly explain the relationship with CAT 20. "All projects officially built on Fractal are willing to support, and this update can be seen more as a test."

At the same time, some community members speculate that the team behind CAT Protocol has been deeply involved in the OPCAT field for a long time, sCrypt Official team. 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 the habits of sCrypt Official.

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

If the speculation is correct, the sCrypt Official team has already received 10,000 FB in funding from the Fractal ecosystem Season 0, proving that the two parties have long been cooperating, so it is not surprising that UniSat supports CAT 20 this time.

In addition to CAT 20 of CAT Protocol, there are currently two other CAT protocols in the Bitcoin ecosystem. One is Danny, the founder of opnet, who claimed to have invented CAT 20 in August and will activate it after 21,000 blocks on the Fractal mainnet; the other is Taproot Wizards and Quantum Cat co-founder Udi Wertheimer, who has also released the token protocol CATNIP based on OP_CAT, but only supports the Bitcoin mainnet.

It seems that the token protocol driven by OPCAT has formed a "three kingdoms" situation. Currently, it appears that CAT Protocol supported by UniSat has the advantage. CAT Protocol can run on any UTXO chain that activates OPCAT, which means that in the future, it can also migrate to the main Bitcoin network once it supports OP_CAT.

The first to sell shovels gets rich

Currently, the over-the-counter trading price of CAT is 2 USDT per sheet (5 pieces), but the trading volume is low, possibly due to the ability to still mint or difficulties in transferring. Below is a table of CAT minting costs created by the community. Currently, the network fee level on Fractal is around 1800-2000, and the cost of minting one sheet is about 2 USDT. There is not much profit in minting now. However, if CAT is minted at a fee below 200, it can currently yield over 10 times the profit.

During the gold rush in San Francisco, it is not known whether a large amount of gold really made adventurers rich, but those who sold jeans and shovels in the mining camp did make real money.

On CAT 20, in addition to the early minters now having substantial profits (if they can sell), those who have made money are the players who provide proxy mining, proxy deployment, and sell FB tokens. All three are the "shovels" needed for minting CAT.

Proxy mining and proxy deployment do not have publicly available data and are difficult to evaluate, but the trend of FB supply shortage has already been reflected in the price—the price has risen from $15 before CAT minting started to $30 in less than a day. Currently, users can trade FB on the community's over-the-counter market, the Bitcoin decentralized exchange DotSwap, and the centralized exchange Coinex. Data shows that the current circulation of FB is about 1.27 million, with a circulating market value of about $38.34 million and a total market value of $630 million.

How long can it last with attention alone?

FLUX, which claims to be the first Fractal token protocol, has already faded from people's view, and over-the-counter trading is also bleak. FLUX at the time used the narrative point of "First is first" to capture early traffic. And now, CAT 20, on the one hand, has grasped the "traditional pursuit" of difficulty and barriers in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and on the other hand, has the blessing of UniSat, once again sparking the attention of players.

Although CAT 20 has certain advantages in design, it is still ultimately 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 "innovations" and "features," causing FOMO in the over-the-counter market, but still unable to 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 continue to persist, consuming attention and chips without any skill, just as before.

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