Fractal Bitcoin Token Drops as Team Unveils Q4 Roadmap

The team at Fractal, the latest Bitcoin sidechain to enter the quest to scale the world’s most valuable blockchain, revealed its auspicious Q4 roadmap.

In October, the team expects to activate Runes, Bitcoin’s version of memecoins. Additionally, Ordinals wallet UniSat will index CAT20 assets, a new trustless CAT20 trading market will launch (although where this will take place hasn’t been disclosed), and Season 1 grants for KOLs, builders, and miners will be announced.

November brings an OP_CAT-based voting model to participate in governance; a major upgrade to PizzaSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) that allows for direct transactions between Bitcoin and Fractal, including LP locking, staking, and rewards; and performance improvements that aim for 15-30 second response times for BRC-20, Runes, and CAT20 protocols.

Lastly, the team aims to implement zkAtomicSwaps for trustless asset trading between Bitcoin and Fractal, further support for the CAT protocol, and more support for PizzaSwap.

The slew of upcoming upgrades didn’t translate to a rise in Fractal’s token price. FB is down 4% today to $7.9 and has shed half its value since peaking soon after it launched in early September.

Fractal received a lot of attention from Bitcoiners when it launched in early September. But the spotlight wasn’t entirely positive, with onlookers peeved over a 50% pre-mine of its FB supply, including allocations for core contributors, community grants, advisors, and pre-sale investors.

The firm’s architecture and tagline are also contentious. It refers to itself as a truly native scaling solution but brings its own token to the table. Disgruntled Bitcoiners also called out the lack of a peg mechanism to bridge from the sidechain to the main chain, which Willem Schroé of Botanix Labs called a concern.

“This means that calling it a sidechain or Layer 2 is nothing more than riding on the wave of the hype around a few Layer 2s that are actually building on Bitcoin,” Schroé told The Defiant.

Schroé isn’t alone in his critique, with Bitcoin Magazine editor Shinobi tagging the project as a “clown show.”

Nevertheless, there are defenders of the protocol, with Punk3700, one of the main developers building the Bitcoin Virtual Machine, firmly excited about Fractal. “Fractal is the perfect chain for builders to experiment with OP_CAT,” he told The Defiant. “It has a good hashrate and a young but strong user base.”