Original author: Jaleel, BlockBeats

In the past few months, Bitcoin has repeatedly hit record highs. The ORDI of BRC 20 and the STAMP of SRC in the Bitcoin ecosystem have also broken new highs and performed impressively. On the other hand, ATOM, the leader of the Atomics protocol with extremely high halal degree, has been suffering from the gloom, the price continues to decline, and the mood of the holder community is not very good.

Although ATOM has successively landed on Unisat and OKX Web3 wallets, and has also been listed on trading platforms such as Gate and Bitget, the price of ATOM has been stumbling downward since the high of $16 in December last year. As of the time of writing this article, the price of 1 ATOM is US$6.478, and the price of one ATOM is US$6,483. Based on the peak price of $16, ATOM has fallen 62% in the past four months.

How has the Atomics ecosystem changed? How is the development of AVM going? BlockBeats wrote this article after in-depth discussions with several developers and enthusiasts in the Atomics community.

Atomics ceiling

In the early days of Atomics, there was almost no discussion of AVM.

Until this year, Arthur, the author of the Atomics protocol, had been working on the development of the split function. We have also observed that the price of ATOM tends to increase as split functionality progresses. It can be seen that community members who held positions early have high expectations for the split function. Under ideal planning, once ATOM is split, the transaction volume and the number of addresses will increase significantly, allowing for early access to the trading platform.

However, before the split, the liquidity of ATOM was like an expensive NFT or a real-life mansion, which was difficult for ordinary people to afford. Even now, the price of a single ATOM is as high as six thousand US dollars, and the holding address is only two thousand. indivual.

Although we can see that Gate, Bitget and OKX Web3 wallets have all listed ATOM in the past few months, first-line trading platforms like Binance and OKX still have not listed the currency. Whether from the perspective of transaction volume or address holdings, first-line trading platforms seem to lack the motivation to quickly promote the listing of ATOM.

The shortest way may also be the farthest way

Since it is so important, why has the splitting function not been launched yet, and instead it has been turned to the development of AVM?

Wizz Wallet is the earliest wallet in the Atomics ecosystem and is currently the most frequently used wallet in the Atomics community. They have very frequent private communications with Arthur, the author of the protocol. Wizz Wallet CEO Brutoshi told BlockBeats that most of the code for the split has actually been launched on the test network, which can be understood as being on hold now.

As for why he turned to the implementation of AVM and postponed the implementation of splitting, Brutoshi also gave his own understanding: Before AVM, if you want to implement splitting, you need to write a lot of code logic in the indexer. Although splitting is done separately Functions can also solve problems. But doing so will result in a huge and complex code being written to death, and there will be a lot of subsequent maintenance, testing and promotion, including the wallet side and the market side, which require extra effort to support, which is very inelegant.

Every public chain or every protocol has its own pronoun. For the Atomics ecosystem, elegance, simplicity, simplicity and halal are some of the key words.

Both solutions are feasible. From the perspective of achieving holder benefits, implementing the split function separately may be the fastest solution, but this is not the best solution for the Atomics ecosystem that Arthur wants to build. choose. What seems like the shortest way may also be the farthest way.

Arthur turned to the implementation of AVM not because the split function was impossible, but out of the pursuit of a more elegant and concise solution. The advantage of this is that the energy spent by everyone in the ecosystem is not wasted on solving a single specific problem, but is applied to a wider range of general problems.

AVM is programmable and has its own scripting language. If you split it, it can be solved with a piece of code. Brutoshi added. It can be said that after implementing AVM, splitting functions is natural.

Although the ceiling of AVM is very high, during the long gap period of these few months, holders who paid more attention to liquidity and needed to realize it quickly and who did not control the position adjustment chose to leave the market first. In the crypto industry where liquidity is king, time is measured in multiples, and investors in the crypto industry tend to be more impatient.

The big players who minted ATOM in the early stage have very clear user profiles. Most of them are people who can understand technology and code. Most of the people who minted ATOM in the early stage have shipped. Philanthropists in the currency circle are the hobby of the Atomics ecosystem. , who is frequently active in the community, he told BlockBeats after long-term observation.

What exactly can AVM do?

Amid the disagreements in many communities, AVM represents the ceiling of the entire Atomics ecosystem, which has become a general consensus within the community. So, what can this AVM, which represents the ceiling of Atomics, do?

On December 13, 2023, Arthur, the author of the Atomics Protocol protocol, accepted an interview invitation from the Ordinal Revolution Podcast and shared the recent developments of the Atomics Protocol and his views on the Bitcoin ecosystem in the interview room without showing his face.

During the interview, Arthur briefly introduced the Atomics Virtual Machine (AVM). As a Turing-complete virtual machine, the AVM is capable of executing various computing instructions required for complex blockchain applications, including enabling developers to Create smart contract programs on Bitcoin and create unprecedented experiences.

Screenshot of the interview room

“With AVM, many possibilities become available, including implementing problems left over from previous history in a more elegant way,” Brutoshi said.

So, what possibilities can AVM create? According to Atomics community enthusiast @PunkOnChain on Twitter, the breakthrough points are: AVM will have an advanced execution environment that can handle smart contracts and dApps; a custom instruction set for enhanced performance to reduce Gas costs; optimized state transitions functionality, increasing parallel processing capabilities to improve throughput and scalability; enabling interoperability and cross-chain communication; and providing a developer-friendly interface.

For those who cannot understand the technical theory, you can simply understand it as: AVM will allow Atomicals to have smarter brains and supercomputers capable of performing various tasks; a special tool kit will make complex tasks easier and more efficient. Save time and effort; have a very smart manager who can keep everything going in an orderly manner; have a translator who can communicate with other communities to make communication between the Atomics system and other systems more convenient; and have a This extremely practical tool book can help developers learn how to use AVM faster.

There are many reasons why I am optimistic about ATOM, but the most important point is that I think ATOMs downward space is limited, and at the same time, ATOMs upward space is unlimited. Atomics, a philanthropist in the currency circle who is an eco-enthusiast, told BlockBeats.

In his opinion, it is not excessive for Longer Atomics to account for 10% to 20% of the market value of Longyi Ordinals. After the development of AVM, the entire ecological space of Atomics has been expanded, at least it can be compared with Ordinals, and in the long run It seems there is no limit. For an Atomicals that can issue both FT and NFT, coupled with the Realms system that allows users to attach their avatars, names and links to online profiles, once AVM is truly realized, the ceiling height will not be underestimated. .

Behind closed doors

In discussions around AVM, we can also hear many community members questioning how Arthur implements AVM. And the most important question is, when will AVM be online?

We caught some signals in some public news. Neeboo, CTO of Wizz Wallet, revealed at a Space event that the protocol authors expect to launch the first version of AVM around the time of the Bitcoin halving, that is, around late April.

On March 19, Atomics enthusiast 0x Sea said on social media that he had discussed the progress of AVM during his communication with Arthur: The alpha version of AVM will be launched soon. The specific time is not sure, but it should be soon. With Neeboo on Space before The disclosed available version launched before halving is not much different. After AVM is launched, it will easily support the pledge, lending, deposit and other functions of ARC-20 assets. Based on AVM, ARC-20 assets can be stored in smart contracts, similar to Ethereum ERC-20 tokens can be deposited into Solidity contracts.

Its a subjective point of view as to whether AVM is being developed behind closed doors. But it is undeniable that Arthur does prefer to hide himself behind the Atomics protocol compared to ordinary protocol founders.

Since announcing the design work of AVM in January, Arthur has not published any documents. Although he has successively revealed the AVM design concept on Twitter, Arthur has not published any documents, which makes community users a little worried. In contrast, Casey The final implementation version of Runes was released to Github yesterday.

Neeboo said on Twitter Space in early March: I havent seen the original design document and some initial code yet. However, according to Wizz Wallet revealed to BlockBeats, Arthur and them will have a regular meeting every once in a while, Arthur The exchange with infrastructure aspects such as wallets continued for a long time.

Each protocol has its own character, which largely depends on the character and values ​​of the protocol author. Almost everyone who has come into contact with Arthur knows that Arthur has always called himself a scientist and technology researcher and has never thought of profiting from it. During the meeting with Wizz Wallet, Arthur also made it clear that he had no financial needs when building the Atomics protocol.

Officially, Atomics has no team, no purpose, no practicality, no roadmap, no investment, nothing.

Brutoshi said: Arthurs structure and values ​​​​are very similar to Satoshi Nakamoto. He added: Once the version of Atomicals and AVM is stable, he may disappear. He is fully prepared for this. Anonymous from the beginning Later, I used a mixer to participate in some exclusive interviews and voice conferences, and I attach great importance to privacy protection.

This is also the reason why many community members have unconditional trust in Arthur. In addition to recognition of his character and values, his technical ability is also an important reason.

At first, Arthur was inspired by Ordinals and wanted to implement some domain name-like functions on Ordinals. After trying for about two months, he felt that it didnt work because Ordinals couldnt support it. Then he thought about it and just started over, which took about six months. He redeveloped the entire protocol over time. His technical skills are really strong and he is also familiar with the Bitcoin protocol. Brutoshi told BlockBeats.

According to Brutoshi, Arthur has participated in the development of mining pool projects and has a soft spot for PoW. This is why the Atomics protocol pioneered the BitWork token issuance mechanism based on PoW.

Going back to some community members’ criticism of the Atomics protocol being “worked behind closed doors”, after a recent regular meeting between Wizz Wallet and Arthur, Arthur seemed to be aware of this and updated the protocol’s development progress and plans on social media yesterday. According to the Atomics Protocol official tweet, the upcoming protocol update plan aims to allow the transfer of tokens smaller than the 546 Satoshi dust limit. This update is intended to address the BTC protocol’s minimum transfer size limit, which was originally introduced to avoid “spam attacks” on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since ARC 20 uses a solid-color coin scheme, it also suffers from this dust limitation, resulting in the inability to achieve token transfers smaller than 546 units.

The solution is to allow partial coloring of UTXOs, but not more than the total number of units in the UTXO, in line with the 1 coin ≥ 1 satoshi principle. This technical solution has three major advantages: first, it can send at least 1 token unit, effectively solving the community’s main concerns about the protocol; second, it can significantly reduce the accidental destruction of tokens; finally, through the Atomics Virtual Machine (AVM) Improves the flexibility and reliability of smart contracts. Neeboo said that what needs to be added is that in Arthurs plan, some coloring technology still hopes to be implemented using contract capabilities instead of directly adding rules to the indexer.

This protocol update is expected to be completed within a few weeks and will coincide with the release of AVM. The Atomics protocol always maintains the promise that 1 token = 1 Satoshi (or more). Following the update, a team of open source developers will work on developing a beta version to steadily integrate the technology while ensuring the industry has sufficient time for testing and consensus.

Changes in the main battlefield of chip structure

In the communication with BlockBeats, the currency circle philanthropist mentioned his investment insights from the chip structure: The chip structure is the most important analysis angle. The chip structure can determine the direction of the market. Think clearly before buying. In whose hands will these chips eventually be concentrated? When the chips flow into the hands of more powerful people, the market can really take off. If these chips are concentrated in the hands of the scientists who created them in the early stages, then the prospects of this project will not be great.

In order to study ATOMs position data and specific chip distribution, BlockBeats investigated the wallet addresses of the top 100 Atom holders in the Atomics Market.

Among the top ten holding addresses of ATOM, there are no holders based on minting. Observing the top 20 ATOM holding addresses, we found that only the 12th-ranked address is minted. Between the 20th and 30th rankings, only the 29th-ranked address is minted; and between the top 30 and 40, there are no holders based on minting.

Continuing to observe further, there are no holders based on minting among the top 40 to 50. Among the top 50 to 60, only the 59th address is minting. Among the top 60 to 60, there are no holders based on minting. Among the top 70, only the addresses ranked 63 and 65 are minted. Between the top 70 and 80, only the address ranked 73 is minted, while there are no addresses between 80 and 90. Based on minted holders, in the end, among the top 100 holders, only the address ranked 93rd is minted.

Among the top 100 holders, there are 6 addresses that own ATOM through minting. The number of holders based on casting has significantly decreased. This shows that early holders have reduced their holdings of ATOM or transferred their holdings.

Whether it is a change of hands or a shuffle, it is obvious that ATOMs liquidity and market influence have changed significantly, and the main battlefield has begun to shift.

Looking back at ORDI, both price trends and community sentiment are very similar. ORDI was really dead from June to September, no different from dead. A philanthropist in the currency circle recalled the situation at that time. The ORDI community at that time, like the ATOM community today, experienced many moments of suffering and pessimism.

After being launched on the GATE trading platform in May 2023, the price of ORDI reached a previous high of approximately $25. However, in the following four months, the price of ORDI experienced a long period of downturn, falling to $2.86 in September 2023.

Until it was listed on Binance on November 7, 2023, the price of ORDI climbed above $50. After the adoption of the Bitcoin ETF in January this year, no one doubted that it was now a bull market. The price of ORDI reached its peak again in March 2024, hitting a record high of $96.17. The holders who can actually obtain the highest point of $96.17 from the initial minting of ORDI are definitely a minority among the minority, and can even be said to be rare. It is a normal process to have a very sluggish turnover period.

But it is precisely because a consensus is formed and explosive power is gained in this process that the project can really take off. Those who lack confidence can leave the market as soon as possible and sell as soon as possible, so that more people have the opportunity to get on the bus. Brutoshi said . Different opinions lead to different investment decisions by Long Short. This is normal and healthy market behavior. Changing hands is a good thing.

Compared with the four months of downturn, ORDI fell from US$25 to US$2.86, experiencing a drop of 88.56%. ATOM has fallen from $16 to $6 now, a drop of about 62.5%. In comparison, ATOMs drop is not too high. Recalling last November, inscription was almost a national sport. There were hundreds of inscription projects on various chains, but only a handful of them could truly survive to this day.

From January this year to March now, the protocol authors have been studying AVM. It is definitely unrealistic to expect AVM to come out immediately and increase the price. Although philanthropists in the currency circle have always suspected that someone is lowering the price of ATOM, he He also admitted that there is a possibility that ATOM may not be favored by capital, but what I am sure of is that there will be room only when there are differences in the market.