BRC-20 Exchange and Indexer UniSat recently completed the Jubilee upgrade, but it has been questioned by the community why the Indexer code has not been fully open-sourced, raising concerns about controlling commercial interests. UniSat responded officially yesterday, stating that their decision was made out of responsibility.
UniSat successfully completed the Jubilee upgrade for BRC-20, but their slow progress in open-source development since May has drawn scrutiny from the community. For a leading project with a value exceeding $3 billion, this is indeed an important issue, and the UniSat team has made an official response.
UniSat stated that their primary task was to minimize the risks during the Jubilee upgrade. Now that the upgrade has been successfully completed, they will promote more open-source projects.
The team explained that the delay in open-source development progress was influenced by historical and practical factors. They did not anticipate that the functionality of BRC-20 would become a focus of the Bitcoin community within a few months, leading to strong accusations of temporary centralization support for UniSat.
When developing BRC-20 internally, the team needed to gradually integrate it into existing products like any other feature, followed by continuous testing and deployment. Initially, UniSat did not develop the BRC-20 Indexer as a standalone product, so it now needs to be extracted from the product’s code to create independent software, which requires significant refactoring. Similar to the criticism faced during the development of Windows 95, where the core components needed to be extracted into the open-source Linux kernel while ensuring the seamless operation of Windows 95, the complexity of this task is self-evident.
Another layer of complexity is that the team aims to improve user experience through optimized solutions, which involves extensive distributed coordination of various servers. They hope to create an open-source Indexer that is lightweight and can run on low-level hardware, accessible to all users rather than just developers. To achieve a lightweight Indexer, extensive streamlining and optimization of the existing architecture are required.
UniSat sincerely hopes for a healthy, open-source BRC-20 Indexer model, as this will create numerous opportunities for different teams to build other services based on the BRC-20 protocol. For example, at the Ordinals summit last September, the team introduced a modular framework based on BRC-20, which was then used to implement native BRC-20 transaction functionality (brc20-swap). If a healthy and open-source model had existed at that time, UniSat would not have needed an additional two months to invent black modules and white modules, as they could have designed a withdrawal mechanism and showcased their advantages.
The modular approach after open-sourcing can be used for other BRC-20 applications, such as lending or advanced applications for stablecoins, enabling rapid expansion of various BRC-20 features. With numerous modules emerging from different teams, BRC-20 will continue to grow and be ubiquitous.
UniSat’s open-source initiative and decision are not just about releasing an open-source code repository; they are an important driver for establishing a robust underlying protocol for BRC-20. Open-sourcing is not an evasion of responsibility; on the contrary, it is a decision to take up the significant responsibility of supporting the development of the BRC-20 protocol.
The team understands that further discussion and time are needed within the community to reach a consensus on BRC-20 related standards, such as proposed transaction attacks and major improvements like supporting the module framework for BRC20-swap. They also hope that community members will pause and consider whether they want to push BRC-20 towards higher-level applications or let it stagnate as one of the many historical mysteries.
In the fast-paced market, UniSat has indeed made significant contributions to the development of the BRC-20 protocol and provided a good user experience with their product, which gives them confidence to support the above vision.
However, since the BRC-20 protocol has become a $3 billion decentralized project, every step taken by UniSat will be closely scrutinized. The delay in decentralizing the Indexer naturally leads to speculation about controlling commercial interests within the community, considering the immense benefits involved. Whether the community accepts this response remains to be seen.