Yesterday may have been a day suitable for cats to come out and sunbathe, at least in the BTC ecosystem. Within a day, we saw 3 BTC FT protocols driven by OP_CAT—CAT20 on Fractal, CATNIP by the ‘Quantum Cat’ team, and ‘Danny CAT20’ by the ‘Moto series’.

Among these three, CAT20 on Fractal has already been implemented vigorously, and the price of $FB once exceeded $30. At the time of writing this article, the on-chain Miner fee rate of Fractal has reached as high as 2000 sats/vb.

The CATNIP of the “Quantum Cat” team is just an official announcement, and the landing will wait until the OP_CAT of BTCMainnet is resurrected.

The “Danny CAT20” of the “Moto series” is the founder of Motoswap and OP_NET, @bc1plainview, who claimed to be the first to propose the OP_CAT drive BTC FT protocol just 2 hours after the CAT20 was released. I won’t go into my specific thoughts here, we’ll discuss it later.

Let’s start with the CAT20 on Fractal, which is now available for play.

CAT20

CAT20 was discovered and spread by players in the early days and did not become popular. Until last night, I could still send some transactions with a fee rate of 300-500 sats/vb. It really became popular when a ‘CAT20’ section suddenly appeared on Fractal’s blockchain explorer around 11 o’clock last night, causing a complete fear of missing out.

The data here has not changed since last night, so it’s hard to calculate how long it will take for $CAT to finish.

If the price of $FB is 30 U, pulled to a rate of 2000 sats/vb, the cost of a single sheet is close to 1 U, which means that in this case, $CAT is “purchased” based on a Market Cap of 21 million dollars.

The technical documentation for CAT20 is quite professional, and the Github page is quite neat, and it is an FT protocol that is actually powered by OP_CAT technology. If you are not an individual or team with a deep understanding of Bitcoin’s technology, it is difficult to dig out something of this level.

What does ‘实实在在使用了 OP_CAT 技术来驱动的 FT protocol’ mean? In the words of the official documentation, it means ‘any rules governing the Token minting process are executed in the Smart Contract’. Based on this, CAT20 has these features (for more features, please refer to the official documentation)

• Does not burn assets. You can directly use the UTXO for minting Tokens to continue minting Tokens, because essentially, CAT20 is like writing data in UTXO and then having the Smart Contract process it. In the past, burning assets was usually understood in the context of ‘colored coins’—once I spent a UTXO with an inscription or ‘colored coin’, it was gone forever. But CAT20 is different, on-chain data cannot be lost, and the contract processes changes by checking on-chain data (transactions). Our UTXO is actually spent on contract interactions, similar to ERC-20.

• ticker can be duplicated. Although ticker can be duplicated, the txid and output index of each Token in the genesis transaction are different, and they together constitute a unique tokenid for the Token, distinguishing different Tokens with the same ticker.

• The mint rules are more flexible. There are no predefined rules; it depends on how the contract is written when deploying the Token. Some use cases mentioned in the official documentation include pre-sale, pre-mining, PoW mining, minting for specified Token holders, stake minting, and so on.

The CATNIP of the Quantum Cat team is similar to CAT20 in implementation, so in the next CATNIP part, I want to focus on the potential huge impact of this thing on the Bitcoin ecosystem.

CATNIP

First of all, I would like to remind everyone that CATNIP will only be launched after the official resurrection of BTCMainnet’s OP_CAT, and there will be no way to participate before that, unlike rune, which can be “preempted” by copying Casey’s idea. The reason is actually explained in the CAT20 part above - without OP_CAT, it is impossible to achieve “any rules that manage the token mint process are executed in the Smart Contract”.

When I saw CATNIP for the first time, my first thought was that @udiWertheimer seemed to have finally revealed his ‘fangs’ and wanted to ‘jump out of Ordinals’…

Why say so? Let’s take a look at his tweet:

He said that the user experience of BRC-20 and rune has disappointed most crypto enthusiasts. Although Ordinals and inscription are widely considered to be superior to other chains in NFT implementation, BRC-20 and rune do not meet the FT protocol standards of other on-chain protocols. The reason is that the consensus (Node and Miner) of BTC does not know their existence, and rune must bypass the restrictions through code tricks, ‘deceive’ (not an attack, just a description) to implement it on the BTC network. This is also why rune’s UTXO needs to be split, otherwise the transaction cannot be partially purchased, and the reason why AMM and liquidity pools cannot be owned.

If the Consensus of Bitcoin accepts OP_CAT, there is no need to think of ways to “deceive” anymore, and more can be achieved.

Since the birth of Ordinals, most of the BTC ecological innovation has revolved around Ordinals, including FT and Non-fungible Tokens. With Udi in this way, perhaps the attention of the BTC ecosystem will be cut in half, half is OP_CAT and FT, and the other half is Ordinals and Non-fungible Token.

And if BTCMainnet’s OP_CAT is successfully resurrected, one of the biggest beneficiaries will undoubtedly be the “Great Wizard” and “Quantum Cat” teams and holders. Even at the moment, we can guess that there are two kinds of income for the holders of these two projects - the first token of CATNIP is given to the “Great Wizard” and the “Quantum Cat” Airdrop, which is directly profitable; Mobilize the community to lead the OP_CAT resurrection movement and finally succeed, and the status as a non-fungible token project is difficult to achieve, indirect benefits.

Besides enthusiasm, I think they also have practical reasons for not resurrecting OP_CAT. After all, ‘The Great Wizard’ raised 7.5 million dollars.

The short-term development will be very interesting. Will Udi have a debate with the supporters of Ordinals (even Casey)? CAT20 on Fractal already has a first-mover advantage, will there be competition between the two, such as CAT20 heading to Mainnet in the future? And this, will it cause a new wave of “dumb buying” between domestic and foreign parties?

Danny CAT20

Compared with the above two, this contestant really has a strong “goofy” attribute… To be honest, I was confused after reading @bc1plainview’s tweet - brother, how dare you say you invented CAT20 a month ago…

There is no professional technical document like CAT20, or a detailed tweet like CATNIP that explains the implementation process. We only have this Telegram screenshot. It’s okay, I’ll explain the idea expressed in this picture - actually using OP_CAT to string together several fields of Mint inscription. Okay, I created the OP_CAT version of BRC-20.

This is completely unrelated to CAT20. Essentially, this is the same as BRC-20, built on the Ordinals protocol. That’s why it says it must wait until Block Height 21000 of Fractal to activate the Ordinals protocol before it can be launched. Furthermore, both CAT20 and CATNIP drive the entire FT protocol using contracts. This Danny CAT20 is actually driven by inscriptions, but the way minting inscriptions are created has changed. They are now concatenated using OP_CAT.

It’s like a piece of beef, CAT20 and CATNIP are exploring how to upgrade the pot into an alchemy furnace and make the beef into Tang monk’s meat. Big brother popped up and said that the steak can be fried as a whole piece, or cut into pieces and grilled on skewers. We are all players of the same level…

The speculative and opportunistic ‘innovation through manipulation’ is no longer viable.

Conclusion

CAT20 and CATNIP undoubtedly excite me. I have been wanting to write about OP_CAT before, but the technical principles are very obscure, and there are no direct use cases to explain and share with everyone in a straightforward way. With the appearance of these two, I think we will see more OP_CAT applications.

Ordinals opened the door to BTC innovation exploration, but the road ahead is long and arduous, and only with the existence of Ordinals is it lonely and abnormal, and we are happy to see more exploration. As for Fractal, the emergence of CAT20 is an excellent interpretation of its “experimental field” positioning, which also makes me look forward to the future development of Fractal.