Thanks to everyone who shared feedback on FIP-101.

We carefully reviewed every comment—most centered on the why and how behind the proposal. To address these, we’ve prepared a letter to the community outlining the motivation and design rationale:

Abstract

The current indexing landscape on Fractal is fragmented, which leads to high costs for application integration and ecosystem collaboration. At the same time, as a piece of critical infrastructure, indexing lacks stable incentives; over the long term this can easily result in supply being concentrated among a small number of providers and in ecosystem lock-in. To address this, we propose promoting an open-source, permissionless, replaceable indexing service system with standardized outputs, and adjusting the block reward allocation structure: from the current 1:2 (merged mining : permissionless mining) to 1:1:1 (merged mining : permissionless mining : data indexing). This adjustment does not change FB’s total issuance or emission schedule; the goal is to achieve a 1:1:1 distribution in the long-run statistical sense.

Implementation details will be released in follow-up publications. The mainnet activation height and timeline will be clarified later and announced in advance.

Why we want to do this

Current problems

1. Indexing is too fragmented, making ecosystem collaboration too costly

There are already many indexing solutions on Fractal—some commercial, some open-source. When indexing becomes the primary gateway for applications to read the on-chain world, inconsistencies between indexers get amplified into ecosystem-wide friction:

• For the same on-chain data, different indexers return different fields, definitions, and results.
• Application teams must do extensive adaptation work; maintenance costs are high and errors become more likely.
• The ecosystem struggles to form unified developer practices and reusable infrastructure.

In the long run, this fragmentation can drag the ecosystem into a pattern of “reinventing the wheel + repeated reconciliation”: slower development, higher maintenance costs, fragmented user experience, and ultimately weaker large-scale collaboration and growth across the Fractal ecosystem.

1. Indexing is foundational infrastructure, but it lacks a long-term, sustainable supply mechanism

For applications and the ecosystem, “data availability, queryability, and reusability” are baseline requirements. But if indexing is carried for a long time mainly by a small number of teams or services, the ecosystem can easily become dependent and locked in. If a service becomes unstable, stops being maintained, or changes rules, neither availability nor neutrality can be reliably guaranteed—let alone true decentralization and long-term sustainability. What we need is not to “maintain the status quo of small, non-replaceable supply,” but a mechanism that can run over the long term: standardization + replaceability + open participation + sustainable incentives.

Why now is the right time

Over the past two quarters, the UniSat team has done substantial refactoring work on the indexer system we maintain. Memory usage has been reduced by about 80%, initial synchronization can complete within 24 hours, and hardware requirements have been significantly lowered. This means ordinary users may be able to run this indexing service without enterprise-grade servers.