Bitcoin sidechain Fractal has been blazing hot since it launched on Sept 9. The nascent protocol has been soaring across all metrics. The Fractal token (FB) is up nearly 300% to $27 from $11, cloud mining costs have skyrocketed 150% as miners pile into the highly hyped project, and more than a third of Bitcoin’s hash rate is merge-mining with Fractal. According to Blockspace Media, transactions on Fractal are reaching their upper bound, with fees at 2,000 sats/vB (Bitcoin’s are at a meager 3 satsv/B or $0.24), with transactions soaring more than 200 times to 400 per block. Since its launch barely 72 hours ago, the Fractal chain has ballooned to roughly 15 GB – and is on target to reach 1.7 TB in January 2025 if these levels are sustained. For reference, the entire Bitcoin blockchain holds roughly 600 GB of data. In their latest newsletter, Blockspace said that the numbers indicate that “cadence mining presents miners with arbitraging opportunities,” which suggests the market should expect miners to allocate more hashrate to Fractal Bitcoin-only mining when the FB token rises. Conversely, when the FB token price drops, miners will likely switch to the merged-mining share of Fractal Bitcoin’s hashrate. Fractal is the latest scaling solution to join an arms race to take Bitcoin to the masses. The project says it achieves scalability through a technique dubbed “recursive layering” which allows for the creation of multiple independent layers on top of Bitcoin that are each capable of scaling Bitcoin’s Layer 1 by 20 times. The project is backed by UniSat, a Bitcoin wallet provider, and Web3 investment firm Block Space Force.