Exclusive Interview with the Founder of UniSat: Sharing Achievements Since Fractal Bitcoin Mainnet Launch and How Criticism Serves as Great Motivation
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Exclusive Interview with the Founder of UniSat: Sharing Achievements Since Fractal Bitcoin Mainnet Launch and How Criticism Serves as Great Motivation
Just as Ordinals earlier exploded on the Bitcoin mainnet, Fractal's innovation and rapid growth could happen at any time in the future due to continuous innovation emerging.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Weilin, PANews
Since Fractal Bitcoin launched its mainnet on September 9, it has demonstrated significant growth momentum. One month after mainnet launch, Fractal's TPS stabilized at over 200 tx/s, generating more than 900,000 token-holding addresses and creating 347 million on-chain transactions—averaging over 10 million daily on-chain transactions. On October 12, UniSat announced on X that the UniSat Runes marketplace had officially gone live on the Fractal Bitcoin mainnet. On October 15, Fractal Bitcoin revealed its Season 1 grant recipients and opened applications for Season 2, with each Season 1 recipient receiving 5,000 FB. Despite being in an early stage, these metrics and milestones indicate that Fractal Bitcoin has attracted substantial attention and active participation.
Recently, PANews conducted an in-depth interview with Lorenzo, founder of UniSat, discussing topics users care about—including optimizations for BRC20 and Runes, perspectives on asset value and potential, project updates, and the roadmap for the coming months. PizzaSwap is now live, with users having successfully created liquidity pools and conducted trades. Lorenzo emphasized that PizzaSwap’s implementation holds significant importance for the development of the BRC20 protocol.
Lorenzo noted that most criticism received so far centers around functionality and user experience of supporting infrastructure. He views such feedback as highly motivating, helping the team continuously calibrate product delivery. He also shared upcoming roadmap items, including the integration of Runes, advancement of CAT20, governance, Swap features, protocol upgrades, and enhancements to cross-chain swaps and PizzaSwap.
Below is the full transcript of the interview:
PANews: How has user engagement and market response been since Fractal Bitcoin launched its mainnet on September 9? Can you share some relevant data?
Lorenzo:
Fractal is still at a very early stage—we’ve only been five months from testnet to where we are today. The enthusiasm and deep exploration from the community on social media have actually exceeded our expectations. Whether positive or negative, all feedback reflects attention toward Fractal, and we sincerely appreciate the community’s support.
One month after mainnet launch, we observed Fractal’s TPS stabilizing at over 200 tx/s, generating over 900,000 token-holding addresses within 30 days, and achieving 347 million on-chain transactions, averaging over 10 million daily transactions. As of October 13, the average daily transaction count over the past seven days exceeded 15 million.
In terms of mining and hash power, Fractal’s merged mining hash rate (380 EH/s) has consistently surpassed half of Bitcoin’s total network hash rate (650 EH/s). The merged mining mechanism ensures network security, and we’re quite pleased with this metric—grateful for the ongoing support from miners and mining pools.
Naturally, these figures are macro-level indicators, offering only a broad impression of Fractal. Short-term popularity serves as strong encouragement, but for us, this is just the beginning. We still have a long journey ahead and must continue working hard to justify the community’s trust.
PANews: Within the Fractal Bitcoin ecosystem, users can mint various types of assets—tokens based on the CAT20 protocol, BRC20-based assets, Stamp-protocol assets, domains, and small images—all of which have recently drawn considerable interest. You’ve also open-sourced the BRC20 protocol on Fractal. Which assets are currently standing out? How do you view the value and potential of different asset types? What does the future landscape look like?
Lorenzo:
We're delighted to see not only native protocols like ordinals and BRC20 thriving on Fractal, but also many other innovative protocols joining the ecosystem. Observing on-chain activity and understanding which protocols and assets users prefer—and how consensus forms—is truly fascinating. Blockchain makes everything so transparent and direct.
Different protocols come with distinct trade-offs. At this stage, we aim to provide foundational network-level support across the board. While we encourage native technological innovation built upon Fractal’s unique characteristics, from an infrastructure standpoint, we maintain relative neutrality without favoring any specific protocol. In the near term, we will focus on optimizing mature protocols like BRC20 and Runes—improving interoperability with the Bitcoin mainnet—as well as strengthening infrastructure support for CAT20.
PANews: Due to high demand for Stamp asset mints, related minting platforms experienced outages between September 26 and 27, leading to user dissatisfaction. How does Fractal Bitcoin view this incident? Will there be intervention or guidance from your side moving forward?
Lorenzo:
Last year during the initial launch of Ordinals and BRC-20, our UniSat Marketplace suffered serious bugs that led to dozens of fraudulent transactions. Our minting platform also frequently malfunctioned during network congestion and was hit by DDoS attacks toward year-end, requiring continuous maintenance. So we deeply understand the challenges projects face when launching new protocols under novel network conditions.
Particularly over the past 30 days since Fractal’s mainnet launch, users have inscribed approximately 278 million inscriptions—an average of over 9 million per day. Our team has endured considerable system pressure, and I believe other project teams face similar challenges.
We believe excellent projects will rise above such demanding environments. For ecosystem projects, we’ll do our best to offer technical support and welcome anyone to reach out for discussion.
PANews: Fractal Bitcoin’s Grants program includes several promising teams such as DeTrading and sCrypt. How are collaborations with these partners progressing? We noticed your official account recently announced a partnership with Bool Network—what are your plans regarding ecosystem expansion and collaboration?
Lorenzo:
All partnerships are advancing according to plan, and progress will be shared at appropriate times. Initially, laying solid foundations remains the top priority. We are actively pushing forward collaborations with cross-chain solutions, wallets, indexers, and miners. Meanwhile, we’re engaging with various protocol- and application-layer projects—including vaults, DEXs, derivatives teams in DeFi, as well as gaming, NFT, and social projects—and actively supporting their deployment efforts. Some teams are building truly innovative things that could positively impact not only Fractal but the entire BTC ecosystem. Once they’re ready, they’ll go public.
The Fractal Ecosystem Grants program operates on a retroactive basis. Season 0 grantees invested significant effort into Fractal, developed excellent platforms and products, and made meaningful contributions to the ecosystem. We hope this ecosystem continues to attract diverse participants who collaborate and co-create opportunities. We’re looking for long-term partners—not only those who build great products, but also those who support and add value to other ecosystem projects. Over the next few months, we’ll place greater emphasis on growing the developer community together with our partners through regular offline events, builder houses, and targeted grants encouraging innovation using new technologies like the CAT Protocol. We’ll continue providing technical implementation support, product ideation advice, and marketing strategy guidance.
Beyond grant recipients, we regularly schedule check-ins with numerous teams—either periodically or as needed—to help them advance their projects. This isn’t just about ecosystem growth; it’s also about ensuring we help these projects achieve greater success.
We will announce Season 1 grant recipients in October (PANews note: publicly released on October 15), and as outlined in our public roadmap at build.fractalbitcoin.io, we’ll soon share details about Season 2.
PANews: What impact has the recently launched PizzaSwap had on the ecosystem? What are your expectations for it?
Lorenzo:
PizzaSwap is now live, and users have already successfully created liquidity and executed trades. We’re very happy to receive user feedback—it helps us improve the product significantly. PizzaSwap aims to openly support all user-preferred protocols through a modular system.
We believe PizzaSwap’s implementation is highly significant for the evolution of the BRC20 protocol. On the Bitcoin mainnet, as one of the maintainers of the BRC20 protocol, we respect its governance rules. On Fractal, however, we can showcase the value of modular solutions—enabling flexible extensions without affecting BRC20’s core, saving block space via innovative transaction batching, and establishing a sustainable incentive model. Throughout Q4, we’ll continue enhancing PizzaSwap’s functionality—such as the recent addition of FB support. Stay tuned for further updates.
PANews: As a Layer2 scaling solution for Bitcoin, Fractal Bitcoin has faced controversy since launch, including criticism over “lacking a functional pegging mechanism” and not being a “true L2.” How does the team respond to these critiques?
Lorenzo:
Fractal Bitcoin has never claimed to be a so-called Bitcoin Layer 2. Fractal is a Bitcoin scalability solution that leverages recursive layers to extend Bitcoin’s scalability using Bitcoin Core software. Our goal is to provide developers with an innovative platform. We’ve already seen useful applications built by both the ecosystem and our own team—block explorers, wallets, trading platforms, markets, native support for protocols like BRC-20, Runes, and Ordinals, plus new protocols like CAT, bridge implementations, miner pool integrations—all launched within just one month of Fractal’s mainnet release. We welcome constructive feedback and look forward to learning from and improving alongside the community.
Regarding Bitcoin usage on Fractal, users can bridge BTC to bBTC or sBTC via Bool Bridge or SimpleBridge. Additional bridging options may emerge in the future.
Most current criticisms relate to functionality and user experience of supporting tools. What many overlook is that despite skepticism, Fractal and its associated protocols and products have successfully launched. Only upon periodic review did we realize that, given Fractal’s scale and technical ambition, our execution has actually been quite solid. Users only see what we deliver, while the team’s most intensive work happens behind the scenes—resolving complex issues to prevent major failures, which is why most users don’t notice disruptions. We must maintain this standard—ensuring foundational stability before refining functionality and UX.
Criticism serves as valuable motivation, helping us continuously refine our product delivery.
PANews: Since FB’s launch, the token price has declined, with some FB miners stating the price has reached their shutdown threshold. How do you view this situation?
Lorenzo:
We do not comment on pricing, though we did anticipate considerable volatility during the early phase. Price reflects market supply and demand dynamics. We appreciate miners participating in the Cadence Mining mechanism, including both permissionless mining and merged mining setups.
Fractal’s mining design allows miners to freely switch to solo mining or join merged mining at lower costs. A drop in solo mining hash power doesn’t compromise overall network security. Unlike Bitcoin, Fractal does not have a clear-cut shutdown price. Thanks to merged mining, we observe Fractal’s hash power trending steadily and consistently, experiencing far less fluctuation compared to other PoW systems during similar periods.
PANews: The Bitcoin scaling space is becoming increasingly crowded. Why did Fractal Bitcoin choose the sidechain technical path? How do you view the current competitive landscape characterized by "blooming diversity"?
Lorenzo:
The fact that more projects are focusing on scaling is actually a positive sign—it means the ecosystem is attracting more attention, liquidity, high-quality projects, and investors. I believe users benefit from having more choices.
At present, Fractal Bitcoin can be viewed as a sidechain running parallel to Bitcoin, but this represents only a transitional form. The true vision involves a robust, elastic system composed of multiple fractal instances capable of supporting diverse use cases.
PANews: Compared to other Bitcoin scaling initiatives, what are Fractal Bitcoin’s core advantages?
Lorenzo:
Positive feedback we’ve received from the community emphasizes that Fractal Bitcoin is genuinely built on top of Bitcoin.
Fractal’s Proof-of-Work mechanism inherits directly from Bitcoin and, in the long run, may help address insufficient miner incentives post-halving.
Many users appreciate the seamless user experience we offer—especially the fact that their receiving addresses (e.g., Taproot, Native SegWit) are identical on both the Bitcoin network and Fractal Bitcoin. They also enjoy the ability to expand their applications from Bitcoin to Fractal, and vice versa when needed.
Additionally, users are likely aware that OP_CAT has been activated on Fractal. This greatly enhances programmability while maintaining high consistency with the mainnet. Innovations stemming from this, such as the Cat Protocol, strongly validate Fractal’s positioning as the optimal “testing ground” for the BTC mainnet. Fractal creates a BTC-native environment with real user interaction, market dynamics, and higher performance. Successful experiments here could influence the future direction of the BTC mainnet—perhaps even catalyzing the revival of OP_CAT on Bitcoin itself. This could become the next pivotal moment for the Bitcoin ecosystem following the breakthrough of inscription protocols enabling token issuance on BTC.
PANews: How does Fractal Bitcoin encourage community members to participate in ecosystem development? Are there plans to introduce additional incentive mechanisms in the future?
Lorenzo:
Incentive mechanisms are double-edged swords—they can drive significant impact when used correctly. Strong incentives come with great responsibility, and we recognize our role in guiding the community. Many developers choose to build on Fractal because they genuinely appreciate and align with the possibilities it enables. They don’t proactively apply for grants; rather, we retroactively support them due to their meaningful contributions, helping ensure their long-term success. Some teams ask whether we’ll provide funding before deciding to build on Fractal—if not, they won’t participate. We find such teams tend to be more pragmatic or lack intrinsic motivation. Given that grant amounts are modest, we know they won’t truly motivate such teams, so we prefer investing time in more passionate and promising ones. Overall, we’re deeply grateful for the high-caliber teams currently building on Fractal and will keep refining our approach. Stay tuned for our next season of grants, hackathons, and developer-focused events.
PANews: What are Fractal Bitcoin’s key goals and plans for the coming months? Is there potential for FB to list on major exchanges and increase liquidity?
Lorenzo:
Our public technical and ecosystem roadmap is available at build.fractalbitcoin.io. We’re open to supporting technical integrations, including fiat on/off ramps. Regarding other liquidity matters, we have no further comments at this time.
Here are some highlights from the roadmap:
October: Introduce Runes and advance CAT20
November: Governance, Swap, and protocol upgrades
December: Further enhance cross-chain Swap and PizzaSwap
PANews: When do you expect or anticipate the next breakout moment for the Fractal ecosystem?
Lorenzo:
Just as Ordinals exploded on the Bitcoin mainnet earlier, Fractal’s innovations and rapid growth could happen at any moment due to the constant emergence of new ideas. All we can do is continuously improve the infrastructure, cultivating fertile soil for innovation to take root.
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