Trac Core for TAP Protocol

With the beta release of Trac Core, representing Phase I of III in the Trac Core rollout, developers can begin to explore decentralized data distribution for Bitcoin Ordinals without the overhead associated with indexing.

Since early May 2023, Trac has been rigorously testing the technology behind Trac Core. This technology focuses on the decentralized distribution of indexing data based on Ordinal-based metaprotocols. However, Trac Core’s ambitions extend beyond this. Standalone protocols, such as PIPE, will also receive substantial support and integration.

With the immediate release of ‘Trac Core for TAP Protocol’, developers and projects can now download, install, and run their ready-to-use environments within a few minutes. This eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with setting up Bitcoin Core and the Ord Wallet.

Instead, by executing a simple ‘git clone && npm start’, you will already be participating in the Trac Indexing Network, allowing you to focus on creating new projects, marketplaces and apps with the provided data. Trac Core is open-source and free to use, and Trac encourages all developers to contribute to its ongoing development.

Moving forward, Trac will continue to release an increasing number of metaprotocol packages. These will include Bitmap, Bitmap Parcels, Pipe, Doginal-based metaprotocols, and essentially any other metaprotocol that garners interest from the community.

Additionally, developers will have the opportunity to create and maintain new metaprotocols and participate in the Trac Network Ecosystem. This includes incentives to earn revenue and run individual indexing businesses.

How it works

Trac Core consists of a peer-to-peer network of indexers, validators and peers that combined 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 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 immediate and future requirements of the ecosystem.

We already support the network with a number of peers so you won’t have problems to connect to the network and start developing.

Requirements

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

• NodeJS 20+
• 2–4 Core CPUs, 8GB Ram
• 500 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 minimze 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/BennyTheDev/tap-protocol-specs/

TAP Protocol Demo Endpoint: https://github.com/BennyTheDev/trac-tap-public-endpoint

What’s Next?

This release marks the begin of Phase I of the Trac Core rollout. Included with Phase I will be…

Currently available:

• TAP Protocol

TBA:

• Bitmap
• Bitmap Parcels
• Ordinals
• Wallets
• PIPE Protocol
• Doginals

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 rollout will span across the year 2024 and is not to be mixed up with a roadmap — we started the rollout already…

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