Fractal Fundamentals

What is Fractal Bitcoin?

Fractal is a Bitcoin-native scaling solution that virtualizes Bitcoin Core software into recursive layers. This allows Bitcoin to support faster, cheaper, and more expressive applications — all while staying fully compatible with Bitcoin’s rules and infrastructure. Fractal is not a fork or a separate ecosystem; it is a programmable extension of Bitcoin.

→ Learn more in our Fractal Primer

Why is it called Fractal Bitcoin?

What’s in a name? A fractal is a self-similar, recursive property. We believe that scaling Bitcoin requires every layer to possess the essence of fractals: consistent across all layers, with as many layers as required to scale, and logically sequenced. Essentially, fractals of Bitcoin!

Why was Fractal created?

Fractal emerged in response to rising Bitcoin mainnet congestion — especially during the BRC-20, Ordinals, and Runes boom in 2023–2024. It offers a native, scalable, and secure environment for Bitcoin activity to grow without compromising mainnet reliability.

Why does Fractal care about virtualization?

Fractal believes it is extremely important that applications are self-consistent with Bitcoin in order to scale effectively. Just as other chains care about chain compatibility and equivalence, Bitcoin applications should have their own standards that work perfectly with Bitcoin as well.

Is Fractal a sidechain or Layer 2?

Fractal functions as a system of recursive Bitcoin Core instances — not a traditional sidechain or L2. While it is merge-mined and operates independently, we retain full compatibility with Bitcoin’s rules, logic, and address formats. It’s more accurate to call Fractal an extension of Bitcoin, not a bridge away from it. Our core tenet is to be an extension of Bitcoin, enabling the growth and adoption of Bitcoin itself. We are only interested in solutions that are truly Bitcoin native.

What are some use cases of Fractal?

Stablecoins and other DeFi applications native to Bitcoin, Ordinals, large-scale games, and other applications are all easily supported on Fractal. All applications built on Fractal are completely compatible with Bitcoin natively.