Why has UniSat delayed the open sourcing of its indexer code? Is it for the sake of industry development or profit considerations?

BRC-20 Exchange Completes Jubilee Upgrade, UniSat Yet to Open Source Indexer Code

UniSat successfully completed the Jubilee upgrade for BRC-20, but the community has questioned why the indexer code has not been fully open sourced, raising concerns about controlling commercial interests. UniSat responded to this issue in an article published yesterday, stating that their decision was made out of responsibility.

UniSat’s completion of the Jubilee upgrade for BRC-20 was smooth, but their slow progress on the open source project since May has been scrutinized by the community. This is a significant issue for a project that is valued at over 3 billion dollars. UniSat’s team has now officially responded to these concerns.

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 continue to promote more open source projects.

The team explained that the delay in open source development was influenced by historical and practical factors. They did not anticipate that the functionality of BRC-20 would become the focus of the Bitcoin community within a few months, leading to strong accusations of temporary centralization support for UniSat’s BRC-20.

When developing BRC-20 internally, the team needed to gradually integrate it into existing products and go through a series of testing and deployment as with any other feature. Initially, UniSat did not develop the indexer for BRC-20 as a separate product, so it now requires a significant amount of refactoring to extract it from the product code and create standalone software. This complexity is similar to the criticism faced during the development of Windows 95, where the core parts had to be extracted into the open source Linux kernel while ensuring seamless operation of Windows 95.

Another layer of complexity is the team’s desire to improve the user experience with an optimized solution, which involves extensive decentralized coordination of various servers. They aim to create a lightweight solution for the open source indexer to run on low-level hardware, accessible to all users and not just developers. Achieving a lightweight indexer requires significant streamlining and optimization of the existing architecture.

UniSat sincerely hopes for a healthy and open source BRC-20 indexing model, as it would 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, and then used this framework to implement native BRC-20 transaction functions (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, but could have designed a withdrawal system that showcased its advantages.

The modular approach after open sourcing can be used for other BRC-20 applications, such as lending or higher-level applications for stablecoins, enabling rapid expansion of various functionalities of BRC-20. UniSat’s open sourcing and decision are not just about launching an open source code repository, but are crucial drivers for the stable development of the underlying protocol for BRC-20.

The team acknowledges the need for further discussion and time within the community to achieve consensus on various BRC-20 related standards, such as the transmission attack proposal and major improvements to support the module architecture of BRC20-swap.

UniSat urges community members to consider whether they want to propel BRC-20 towards higher-level applications or let it stagnate as one of the many mysteries of history. In a rapidly evolving market, UniSat has made significant contributions to the development of the BRC-20 protocol and provides a good user experience with their product, giving them the confidence to support their vision.

However, now that the BRC-20 protocol has become a 3 billion dollar decentralized project, every step UniSat takes will be closely scrutinized. The delay in decentralizing the indexer has naturally led to speculation about controlling commercial interests within the community, considering the immense profits involved. The response from the community regarding this remains to be seen.

BRC-20
UniSat
Indexer