Ecosystem Update

This article will introduce the Trac-Tap-Pipe ecosystem to newcomers and offer a clearer picture for existing community members curious about what we’re up to. Our goal is to explain our activities, strategies, and long-term vision in a way that is coherent. Through this article, we hope to demystify our processes and share the reasons behind our choices, helping everyone understand and engage with what we do. We might update the article from time to time in the next month or two in order to add more content and explanations for newcomers.

Disclaimers: details are subject to change.

The lack of communication and building in stealth

The lack of communication and building in stealth Over the past few months, we have not been very active on social media and have deliberately limited the amount of information shared about what we are working on at Trac Systems, especially regarding our project roadmap. Many community members have urged us to disclose more details, and some have even been more vocal about not understanding what we are building anymore. This was a deliberate choice on our part. Since May 2023, the Trac Discord has gradually become a platform where everyone asks about various ordinary topics, including questions about our competitors, our perspectives on development, and our long-term goals. This has led to several drawbacks, and we decided that in order to continue building without being influenced by market sentiment, competition, and narrative, we needed to operate in stealth mode and let the community judge us based on what we produce.

Go to market Strategy & Protocols

Trac Systems’ purpose as a company is to deliver some products on the Bitcoin network while staying as close as possible to work on L1. We are not opposed to L2 as a company but we prefer to try and push the limitation of development rather than using existing solutions and copy/pasting them. As such, most of our products are and will be focusing on using and trying to augment the power of Bitcoin without the use of alternative chains. This leads to our protocols and software being easier to use. Additionally, we feel our solutions will be more efficient, less dependent on 3rd party chains, and thus easier to find adoption.

Trac Core is our decentralized indexing solution for Bitcoin network. The current indexers available to users on the market are all centralized. Trac Core brings our vision of having indexers that are decentralized and work through a decentralized validation process to life. The token $TRAC was a fair mint and is fully diluted. This token will be used to power up the Trac Core solution and will be the main governance token of the Tap Protocol.

Tap Protocol is a protocol that enhances OrdFi functionality, enabling the secure locking of value on Bitcoin. Similar to the transformative Ethereum DeFi summer, TAP introduces comparable capabilities for Bitcoin, expanding the scope of value locking. The $TAP token is currently not available on the market but will soon be. The token will be used for reducing fees on the protocol marketplace, payment for developer tools, and some developer-to-user interactions, bridging fees reduction, and many other utilities on the protocol (Tokenomics will be added once available).

Pipe Protocol offers a robust framework for integrating digital tokens into the Bitcoin blockchain, leveraging the strengths of the UTXO model to ensure secure, decentralized, and efficient token management. Whether for creating unique digital collectibles or for more complex financial transactions, Pipe provides a solid foundation for expanding Bitcoin’s utility beyond simple currency transactions. $PIPE was a fair mint and is fully diluted on the market.

Our team has been focusing on trying to expand in all innovative areas of the Bitcoin ecosystem and push its limits. The Tap protocol represents our innovation on the ordinal ecosystem while Pipe represents our development as a UTXO model. Other protocols may be developed with time if we see potential with them as well as adoption by the community. Tokens & Development

Tokens & Development

$Trac

As of this article’s writing, $TRAC is available on high-volume exchanges Gate and Bitmart. $TRAC has gained significant traction and popularity among the community, driven by the technology it supports and the rising interest in ordinals. In May 2023, BennyTheDev launched $TRAC on the market without minting any tokens for himself — a stark contrast to many BRC-20 projects on centralized exchanges (CEX) that reserve 10–25% of their supply for themselves. This move, made out of consideration for the community, unfortunately introduced some limitations in terms of our team’s ability to scale and expand our presence on additional CEXs.

Most CEXs demand high trading volumes, and market makers require a substantial amount in both dollar value and tokens to generate the necessary volume/ help the liquidity & order book large enough for new exchange listings. Consequently, $TRAC’s listing capabilities have lagged behind other BRC-20 tokens. “We would love to list you but…” has become a familiar refrain over the past few months. Fortunately, we’ve identified some workarounds and expect to expand our CEX listings soon.

As for the token itself and utility, it will be used very soon for pre-purchasing of validator’s rights. (see section below on validators)

$Tap

The Tap token has been entirely minted by Benny and is held in company custody until its market launch. For this token, we’ve decided against using a fair launch model, as it doesn’t provide long-term incentives. Instead, we’ve opted for a more traditional contribution approach through venture capital. This strategy allows us to raise the necessary capital to scale up, expand our team with experts, and develop products that are not only needed in the market but are also innovative and likely to achieve mass adoption. This decision to follow a traditional business model reflects our commitment to transparency and integrity, staying away from practices like shadow minting.

Since our fundraise, we have been able to scale up the team to 7 developers and 3 business and marketing personnel. Our cap table included a mix of some of the largest Bitcoin miners, financial institutions, as well as security experts. We are satisfied with the help they have been providing us in terms of outreach and market insights as a whole.

The airdrop

Our airdrop strategy in terms of bringing two snapshots was to ensure that hodlers of $TRAC and long-term supporters were rewarded in the form of early $TAP allocations. The first snapshot was done on the 28th of February 2024, and the second snapshot date was done on the 30th of April 2024. We prepared a 50–50 allocation for each snapshot as well as a bonus of 50% for people holding the same balance on each snapshot. Those tokens will be available on $TAP listing day (at the moment TBA).

The public round and Coinlist

On the 2nd of May and to mark the last day before Trac anniversary we decided to release the news of the Tap protocol being one of the next token launches on Coinlist.

Coinlist, recognized as one of the most reputable platforms for token launches, has previously worked with prominent projects like Solana and Near Protocol. We aim for Tap to reach a broader audience, not just catering to the Bitcoin community but also attracting people and liquidity from various other chains. Given its professionalism and experience, we believe Coinlist is the perfect platform to help us achieve these goals, expanding our reach and enhancing our project’s visibility across the crypto ecosystem.

$PIPE

Many have questioned our commitment, and some even believe we have abandoned our project, but nothing could be further from the truth. We are gearing up to provide updates and focus on developing the Pipe ecosystem very soon. We already have ideas for functionalities to implement and have identified perfect use cases for the protocol and token. We will update this section of the article with more details as soon as we are ready to reveal more (such as Pipe AI).

Validators and participation

Trac Core consists of a peer-to-peer network of indexers, validators and peers, combined, they represent the Trac Indexing Network:

• Indexers: also called writers, do the heavy lifting and commit their indexing results to the Trac Network.
• Validators: validate indexing data and reward indexers for correct data and availability. Validator access can be obtained through $TRAC (BRC-20) tokens which gives the right to earn $TAP (TAP Protocol) tokens. $TAP tokens will then be spread across indexers and validators based on their performance.
• Peers: also called readers, receive validated index data that can be used as decentralized APIs to support marketplaces, exchanges and any other app that developer seek to develop. The user of peers is entirely free. The release of “Trac Core for TAP Protocol” represents the release of the first peer application.

Peers (Readers):

This release supports readers for TAP Protocol and helps each peer — as the name suggests — to support each other. The more peers exist, the better and faster the data-retrieval. Think of these peers like BitTorrent but tailored for the immediate and future requirements of the ecosystem. We already support the network with a number of peers so you won’t have problems connecting to the network and starting to develop.

Requirements

To run “Trac Core for TAP Protocol” and start developing, the requirements are low:

• NodeJS 20+
• 2–4 Core CPUs, 8GB Ram
• 100-250 GB SSD (depending on the metaprotocol)

This means, Trac Core is using the most popular/widely adopted development platform (NodeJS) and runs on small machines like Raspberry PI 3–5. This includes multiple instances for different protocols on one machine (great to minimize costs and having a low carbon footprint).

This already makes Trac Core the most efficient indexing ecosystem now and in the future.

Installation & Documentation

Though we are in Phase I, there already exist a plethora of material to start with:
Installation instructions: https://github.com/Trac-Systems/tap-reader
TAP Protocol Specs: https://github.com/Trac-Systems/tap-protocol-specs
Trac Systems GitHub, including boilerplate examples: https://github.com/Trac-Systems

What’s Next?

This release marks the beginning of Phase I of the Trac Core rollout. Phases II and III of the rollout will include the release of tools and apps (Phase II), indexer packages and the final implementation of validators and incentives (Phase III). The entire Trac Core rollout will span across the year 2024 and is not to be mixed up with our roadmap — we started the rollout already.

Validator pre-participation and $TRAC utility

We will soon open pre-purchase and participation of validators’ rights (date and price to be added and detailed on a subsequent article).

Validator participation will be facilitated through the direct purchase of licensing rights, payable in $TRAC. We plan to sell a limited number of validator licenses, with prices increasing over time from May to December. For example, if the first 300 validators are set at a base price, the second batch will include a premium on top of that base price, and subsequent batches. The final batch of 300 validators will be priced such that only institutions or companies can afford them. We have already secured commitments from five non-crypto institutions to join the first round of validations, and we will announce their participation in due course.

An ecosystem pool with a capped maximum allocation will also be launched for people who cannot run validators themselves. More info to come.

Socials

Trac Systems Discord: https://discord.gg/trac
TRAC on X: https://x.com/trac_btc
TAP on X: https://x.com/tap_protocol
Pipe Protocol on X: https://x.com/PipeBtc
TAP Protocol Telegram : https://t.me/tap_protocol
Pipe Protocol Telegram: https://t.me/pipe_btc